How Google are helping the Tories rig the general Election. Again!

Google's corporate code of conduct famously includes the phrase "don't be evil", but if deliberately colluding, for cash, with one political party to rig elections in their favour isn't "evil" then it's hard to know what is.

In 2017 Google accepted wads of cash from the Tories in order to help them hijack political searches so that anyone in the UK searching "Labour manifesto" would end up seeing an outrageous Tory attack site full of outright lies as their first search result.

In any sensible country this kind of cynical manipulation would have been legislated against so that political parties can't hijack political searches with attack ads, but given that the party of government were beneficiaries of these cynical, democracy hijack tactics, and most of the rest of the Westminster establishment class are a bunch of bloody incompetents, and the Electoral Commission are an absolute joke of an organisation, nothing whatever was done.

So Google and the Tories are at it again, this time hijacking search terms like "register to vote" and "postal vote" to serve up Tory attack ads as the first result, instead of neutral links with information on how to actually register to vote, or obtain a postal vote.
 

4 examples of this Tory-Google attack ad strategy
(click to enlarge)

The link description in these attack ads includes hyper-partisan Tory slogans like "back Boris", "get Brexit done" or "don't risk Corbyn", and the link itself takes you to a data harvesting page where the Tory party collect your personal information under the guise of needing it to register you to vote!
Research has shown over and again that huge numbers of people are incapable of differentiating between genuine search results and sponsored adverts, so it's not like pumping hyper-partisan political propaganda has no effect. If it had no effect, the Tories wouldn't be blasting huge wads of cash on doing it would they?

Just imagine if you enquired with your local council about how to register to vote or obtain a postal vote, and instead of offering you neutral advice, they sent you a load of hyper-partisan party political propaganda for one particular party.

There would be absolute outrage about it, especially if it turned out that this particular political party was actually paying the local council staff to supply their propaganda, instead of impartial advice.
 

If you click the link, it takes you to this
Tory data collection page.

But since it's Google behaving in this outrageous manner, it's apparently perfectly fine and acceptable!

Just consider all the scandal surrounding Russian efforts to hijack our democracy, and consider that by rigging their search results Google is doing a much more effective job of undermining our democracy, and they're doing it for cash, out in the open, because nobody seems to care.

And even if there aren't specific rules against this insidious collusion between Google and the Tories, it would easily be within Google's power to reserve democratically sensitive search terms to prevent this kind of sponsored hijacking (in the way that Twitter have banned political adverts), but they don't lift a finger to protect democracy, because helping the Tories hijack democracy is a nice little earner for them.

Of course Google aren't the only ones actively helping electoral cheats and liars to destroy democracy, what with Facebook making a special exemption for political parties to allow them to tell outright lies in their paid adverts.

For the best part of a decade the Tory party have allowed tech giants Google and Facebook to pay virtually no tax on the vast profits they make in the UK, and now Google are once again actively colluding with the Tory party attack and undermine democracy.

Something needs to be done because if left unchecked, democracy is going to be undermined to the point of destruction by the tech giants, not particularly because they aim to bring about the end of democratic era, but because helping electoral cheats and liars to wreck democracy is a nice little earner for them in the short-term!

That's the banality of evil right there.

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Google are helping to rig the general election for the Tories

The Google motto is "don't be evil", but taking cash from a particular political party to help them undermine democracy with a vicious smear campaign is pretty damned evil isn't it?

The Labour manifesto

The Labour Party has produced a fantastic manifesto full of policies to help ordinary British people, and rescue the economy from the damage inflicted by seven punishing years of socially and economically ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma, but anyone who attempts to find it with a Google search is confronted by an outrageous Tory attack advert as the first link.

As you can see the first hit is a Tory party attack advert full of lies, the next hits are mixed mainstream press coverage of the manifesto, and the actual link to the manifesto is off the bottom of the screen (I had to zoom right out to to take the screenshot).

 

Tory smears

The Tories are able to flood the Internet with these attack adverts because they're being bankrolled by huge donations from the mega-rich who don't want Corbyn to win the election and make them start paying their fair share.

Several of the major donors who are bankrolling the Tory election campaign are proven tax-dodgers and people running their businesses out of tax havens.

The attack ad itself is an absolute abomination full of misrepresentations, out-of-context quotations, smears, and outright lies.

One of the most brazen misrepresentations is where they claim that Corbyn wants to raise income tax to 25% simply because he once observed that the income tax rate used to be 25% in previous generations (which is true).

In reality Labour have pledged to not raise income tax for the 95% of ordinary workers and it's the Tories who have scrapped their 2015 manifesto commitment to not raise income tax (don't you just wonder why they would scrap such a pledge?).

Another lie is that he won't reduce the deficit (the Institute for Fiscal Studies report on his spending plans says that he will reduce the deficit) and another lie is that he wants "unlimited immigration" (just read the Labour manifesto on immigration for yourself to see their actually very sensible immigration policies).

This kind of manipulative Tory lying and smearing is indicative of the entire 2017 Tory general election campaign. There's nothing positive about their own manifesto at all, just a constant barrage of misrepresentations, lies and smears about the Labour Party.

Google's role in this

By allowing the Tories to hijack Google searches for the Labour Manifesto with their astoundingly dishonest smear campaign, Google are ensuring that thousands upon thousands of people who were looking for Labour Party policies end up looking at savage Tory smears against the Labour Party instead.

We know that huge numbers of people will have fallen for the attack ad because there is mountains of research to show that huge numbers of people are incapable of differentiating between sponsored adverts and legitimate content. There's also research to show that once the link is far down enough that people have to scroll down to see it, it's very much more unlikely that it gets clicked than the top results.

The electoral rules are a total farce if they allow one party with a lot of cash to hijack Internet searches for other parties' manifestos with brutally dishonest attack adverts, but even if this thing is technically legal, Google has no actual obligation to take the Tory cash and help them subvert democracy.

If Google had any company ethics whatever, they'd specify that political Google searches during democratic elections are off limits for sponsored adverts, especially sponsored adverts from rival political parties.

One other thing to note is that under David Cameron's Tory government Google were given an extraordinary sweetheart tax deal by the HMRC that worked out at an effective tax rate of just 3%.

The manifesto that Google is helping the Tories to hijack and suppress with their attack ads actually contains a pledge to make the taxation system fairer. One of Labour's key taxation policies is to put an end to sweetheart tax deals between major corporations and HMRC.

I'm not saying that Google are deliberately interfering in our election in order to ensure defeat for a party that would make them pay their fair share of tax.

I can't say that because I don't have any evidence of conspiracy. In to prove that there has been collusion we'd need incriminating evidence like internal company emails or emails between Google and the Tory party.

It would be interesting to see what Google did about these attack ads, and whether executive decisions were taken to allow this kind of political hijacking in full knowledge that it was an obvious subversion of the British people's democratic right to seek accurate representations of Labour's own policies.

I can't allege a Google conspiracy to undermine our democracy in order to ensure a government that is favourable to their financial interests. But even without hard evidence of conspiracy it still looks very very bad for Google to be taking cash from the Tory party in return for allowing them to hijack the Labour manifesto with outrageous attack adverts.

If Google had any kind of corporate ethics at all, they simply wouldn't allow this kind of democracy-wrecking smear attacks on their search engine.

Streisand effect

If enough people share this article and inspire others to go and read the Labour Party manifesto for themselves, we could create what is called the Streisand effect.

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.

It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread the information is significantly increased. 

Read the Labour Party manifesto for yourself here

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The sneaky Tories are trying to stop people reading criticism of their depraved Dementia Tax

The sneaky Tories are trying to prevent people from reading criticism of their depraved dementia tax by throwing money at the problem.

Even though Tory MPs outright refuse to use the "dementia tax" term to describe their stealth 100% inheritance tax on everything above £100,000*, the Tory party have bought a Google Advert to be displayed at the top of Google searches for the term "dementia tax".

The Advert takes you to a page on the Tory manifesto that claims to explain "the facts" about Dementia Tax, but it's just a load of utterly biased drivel designed to con people into forgetting their concerns about the policy by lying that it's "in the national interest" create the frankly ridiculous narrative that dementia tax is necessary in order for the UK to get a good Brexit deal, and concludes with a deceptive and highly partisan attack on Jeremy Corbyn.

The Tories clearly don't want people reading the pages and pages of Google results that return criticisms and denouncements of their plans to asset strip elderly people with degenerative illnesses, so they've lobbed a load of cash at Google in order to buy the sponsored advert at the top of the page in order to promote their own partisan political propaganda.

Whatever lies they spout about Dementia Tax being a "necessary" or "difficult" decision that they're taking "in the national interest", don't believe them. 

If the economy is in such a terrible state that the government needs to asset strip elderly people in order to pay the bills, how on earth can the Tories afford to be giving away £70 billion worth of tax cuts to their corporate chums?

The Tories are trying to feed into the insecurities that many elderly people feel about the state of the economy in order to justify this policy of extracting the wealth they worked so hard to build up, but it's just a lie. It's a manipulative justification narrative designed to elicit a desired emotional reaction that has no actual grounding in reality.

Conclusion

The Tories are buying up Google Ads to gazump all of the rightful condemnation of their outrageous plot to asset strip the elderly and spread.

Don't believe their deceptions.

If we can't afford to look after our elderly people when they get ill in their old age (after lifetimes of paying National Insurance as social security for their old age), then how on earth can we possibly afford to give £70 billion to the Tories' corporate chums in tax breaks?

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* = £100,000 is less than many Tory MPs claim in parliamentary expenses per year.

The bizarre Tory effort to rebrand themselves as "The Workers Party"

If you ever needed another demonstration of how insanely out-of-touch the Tories are with reality, you just need to consider the plan by Tory party chairman Grant Shapps Michael Green to rebrand the Tory party as "The Workers' Party".

There is so much wrong with this proposed rebranding it's incredible. It would be funny if it weren't so Orwellian.

Party funding
[Main article]
         
The Tories, and their braying supporters in the corporate controlled press have constantly attacked the Labour party over the fact that their party is mainly funded by small donations from hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers, via democratically organised institutions (the trade unions). Meanwhile the Tory party is funded by a rogues gallery of extremely dodgy rich people, without the faintest trace of democratic accountability.

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that is majority funded by donations of over £50,000 a shot from the super-rich, to represent the interests of ordinary workers?

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that has a secretive inner cabal of super-rich donors that it refers to as "The Leaders Group", to represent the interests of ordinary workers?

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that allows their wealthy donors to write up their own wish-list of anti-worker legislation as official Tory party policy, to represent the interests of ordinary workers?
         
Wage Repression
[Main article]

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that the Tories actively work against the interests of ordinary workers is the fact that since they came to power in 2010 the ordinary workers of the UK have suffered the longest sustained fall in real incomes since records began!

The Tories have fueled this decline in real incomes with their derisory increases in the minimum wage, their attacks on public sector pay, their refusal to legislate against companies that employ the majority of their staff on Zero-Hours Contracts, their massive expansion of Stalinist forced labour schemes, their cuts to in-work social security payments and their constant claims that "Britain is Bankrupt".

All of these factors have driven down the incomes of the poor and ordinary. What makes this deliberate Tory campaign of wage repression even worse is that the super wealthy elite have spent the last four years making themselves richer than ever.

Workers rights

The Tories have a long history of attacking workers rights. Just think of their ideological attacks on the trade union movement during the 1980s. These attacks have continued under the current government. There's the financial attack against people that have been unfairly dismissed, the revocation of established workers rights from people forced onto Iain Duncan Smith's Stalinist mandatory labour schemes, the increase in the state pension age, George Osborne's ludicrous "Shares for Rights" scheme, the parts of the "Gagging Law" designed to silence trade unions from speaking out on behalf of their members, and there's also the element of the "Gagging Law" designed to attack the right to privacy of trade union members.

If the Tories were really "The Workers' Party" would they really have spent the last four years deliberately undermining workers rights?
      
International Labour Day
[Main article]

If there is one thing that illustrated the Tory contempt for the value of labour more than any other, it must have been their plan to scrap the May bank holiday, which is celebrated worldwide as International Labour Day.

Grant Shapps Michael Green

I don't normally go in for the personality politics side of things, but it is impossible not to note that the man behind this ludicrous Tory rebranding exercise is the Internet conman turned Tory party chairman, Grant Shapps Michael Green. Grant Shapps' Michael Green's Internet con involved selling a programme that stole the creative content of other websites, changed a few keywords, then packaged the stolen content up into fake websites, in order to cash in on Google Ads. As he was doing this scam, he hid behind the false name Michael Green, and allegedly a number of other fake names too.

When Google figured out his scam, they blacklisted any site using the Grant Shapps Michael Green programme from their Google Rankings. Grant Shapps Michael Green is a man so corrupt that his dodgy Internet scams have even been blocked by Google!

It's no wonder at all then, that this corrupt con man has devised a new fraud, designed to con gullible members of the public into believing that the Tories represent the interests of ordinary workers, when the evidence is so absolutely clear that they don't.

Conclusion

This Tory rebranding exercise is a plan built on the assumption that the public are so extraordinarily gullible and ill-informed that they will simply accept this ludicrous new Tory narrative, in the same way that they have lapped up so many other ludicrously counter-factual Tory narratives (the Great Neoliberal Lie, The "Making Work Pay" fallacy, the "We're All in This Together" fallacy, the "your human rights are a burden that need to be scrapped" narrative ...).

The evidence is absolutely clear; the Tories are the anti-worker party, yet they believe that there are enough hopelessly gullible people in the UK that this blatant propaganda effort to rebrand themselves as the opposite of what they are will win them a significant number of votes, otherwise they wouldn't be trying it.

The Tories are once again assuming that the people of Britain are such a feeble-minded bunch that they'll believe any old rubbish they're told, no matter how blatantly counter-factual it is.


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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

                   
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