Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird led the effort to send a letter to Google executive Neal Mohan on Monday regarding labels placed on pro-life videos on the social media platform.

The letter said the notices violate the First Amendment and spread "false" information about abortion that "minimizes and downplays some of the serious risks of abortion drugs," potentially endangering women's lives.

The letter cites an example of a pro-life video on YouTube about chemical abortion posted by Alliance Defending Freedom in February. Under the video, a notice appears with the title "Abortion Health Information." The message says that surgical and chemical abortion are procedures "to end a pregnancy" done "by a licensed health care professional."

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This group, accused of exhibiting cult-like behaviour, reportedly holds significant influence within Google. There have been claims that the group is actively recruiting new members to join the tech giant.

A spokesperson from Google said, "It's against the law to ask for the religious affiliations of those who work for us or for our suppliers, but we'll, of course, thoroughly look into these allegations for any irregularities or improper contracting practices. Read more

In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe V Wade, more than 650 employees at Alphabet Inc signed the petition which demands that Google remove "results for fake abortion providers" and what the union considers "misleading information" about reproductive health care services.

The petition also demands that Google stop collecting users' data on abortion-related searches, saying that users' data would be "used against them" in states that have banned or restricted abortions.

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He alleged that as many as 12 Fellowship of Friends members and close relatives worked for the Google Developer Studio. Read more

Statistics provided to the UK Home Affairs Select Committee show that only 25,000 of nearly 15 million videos that were flagged as hateful or abusive between July and December last year have been removed.

Proportionately, the videos removed equate to just 0.17 percent.

The statistics were requested from YouTube as part of the parliamentary committee's inquiry into hate crimes.

The revelation prompted accusations from the committee's chair, Yvette Cooper, that YouTube and its parent company Google weren't "taking any of this seriously enough".

"We have raised the issue of hateful and extremist content with YouTube time and time again, yet they've repeatedly failed to act. Even worse than just hosting these channels, YouTube's money-making algorithms are actually promoting them, pushing more and more extremist content at people with every click.

"We know what can happen when hateful content is allowed to proliferate online and yet YouTube and other companies continue to profit from pushing this poison.

"It's just not good enough. Other social media companies are at least trying to tackle the problem but YouTube and Google aren't taking any of this seriously enough. They should be accountable for the damage they are doing and the hatred and extremism they are helping to spread."

YouTube says most of the videos were flagged by artificial intelligence rather than humans and computer programmes struggled with the "complex" area of hate speech.

The technology giant says the flags are often found to be inaccurate when reviewed by human moderators.

The UK select committee asked to see the statistics after Marco Pancini, YouTube's Director of Public Policy Europe, the Middle East and Africa, appeared before MPs last month.

The committee is now waiting for answers from Google on a number of other questions posed in the hearing.

Among these are why videos of the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings are still appearing on YouTube.

Google was criticised strongly after copies of the live stream posted by the shooter on Facebook was uploaded to YouTube thousands of times on the day of the terror attack.

A letter from the committee says one of the Christchurch videos had received more than 720,000 views.

UK Members of Parliament also want Google executives to explain why YouTube recommends videos of far-right figures such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson) even to viewers who have never watched such content.

Source

• The Telegraph
• The Times
• Image: Loop Vanuatu

The protests happened in waves, with workers walking out of their offices, carrying signs and chanting, as the clock struck 11 in Singapore, Hyderabad, Berlin, Dublin, and finally in New York and at Google's corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The walkouts were the culmination of months of employee discontent over immoral choices by Google leadership, including a project called Dragonfly, a prototype of a censored search engine that could be deployed in China, where the state restricts its people's access to information, and Project Maven, an artificial intelligence service developed for the US Department of Defense.

But the walkouts themselves were spurred on by a recent New York Times report that found that the company had tolerated alleged sexual harassment among its executives.

Andy Rubin, one of the creators of Google's Android mobile service, was given a $90m exit package and a fond farewell from Google leadership after an internal investigation found disturbing allegations of sexual harassment against him to be credible.

The company also gave a multimillion-dollar exit package to another executive, and retained a third after allegations against him came to light.

In all three cases, the company covered up the allegations, aided by the mandatory arbitration clauses in employee contracts that mandate that internal complaints against the company must be kept secret.

The revelation of the payouts to abusive executives is not the first time that Google has come under fire for its allegedly sexist internal culture.

In 2017, the Google engineer James Damore ignited controversy by publishing a manifesto in which he claimed that women are less intelligent than men.

Google has also faced lawsuits over its gender pay gap brought by former employees and the US Department of Labor. And in one embarrassing recent incident, Google founder Sergey Brin was asked at a staff meeting if he had any female role models.

Brin responded that he had recently met a woman at a Google event who impressed him, but could not remember her name.

The woman was Gloria Steinem.

There are dangers in overstating the significance of the Google walkout.

The employees, after all, are among the more comfortable and powerful voices of the #MeToo movement; they are white-collar workers in major cities protesting against the actions of a powerful company that is subject to media scrutiny and thus more likely than others to be shamed into doing the right thing.

In any social movement, there are pitfalls to overemphasising the voices of the powerful; it can begin to seem that theirs are the only voices there are.

But the Google walkout also demonstrates #MeToo's versatility, and its potential to mobilise women around other, intersecting issues. Continue reading

Image: The Guardian

At present voters are being asked to decide whether to repeal Ireland's constitutional ban on most abortions.

Google says protecting "election integrity" is behind their decision.

Advertisements on Google-owned companies AdWords and YouTube are included in the ban.

Facebook says its decision to veto ads in the abortion campaign respond to global concerns about online election meddling.

Although Ireland outlaws political donations from other countries, social media advertising is not illegal.

This loophole has allowed US-based anti-abortion groups to buy online ads in Ireland during the referendum campaign.

They have criticised Google and Facebook's decision, saying it is damaging efforts to preserve the Eighth Amendment to Ireland's constitution.

The Amendment recognised the unborn child's right to life.

Pat Leahy, who is the Irish Times' politics editor, is concerned about Facebook and Google's decision.

He says it "deprives anti-abortion campaigners of a key element of their strategy for the final two weeks of the campaign."

Pro-Life Campaign, Save the 8th and the Iona Institute have issed a joint statement on the technology giants' advertising ban.

"It is very clear that the Government, much of the establishment media and corporate Ireland have determined that anything that needs to be done to secure a ‘Yes' vote must be done.

"In this case, it means preventing campaigns that have done nothing illegal from campaigning in a perfectly legal manner."

They say mainstream media is dominated by pro-repeal voices.

This left online media as the only platform they could use to speak directly to voters on a large scale.

"That platform is now being undermined in order to prevent the public from hearing the message of one side," they say.

The role of internet ads being bought by foreign countries to sway voters is a global concern.

It is said Russian-backed Google and Facebook advertising during the 2016 US presidential campaign influenced voters.

The advertising messages aimed to confuse and disturb Americans on controversial topics.

Both Google and Facebook are trying to improve transparency before the US midterm elections in November.

These include tools to show the home country of advertisers.

Source

• New Zealand Herald
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: CNN Money

Speaking to a two-day summit of Catholic and labour movement leaders at the Vatican last Friday, O'Grady said the world needs a new figure like Cardinal Manning.

(Manning was influential in setting the modern-day Catholic Church direction, advocated for social justice and helped settle the London dock strike of 1889.)

"He [Manning] didn't just make moral pronouncements but rolled up his sleeves and tried to bring about a fair settlement to the dockers' dispute," O'Grady continued.

She called on Catholics to challenge the titans of technology.

She named some of them as including tech giants Apple, Facebook and Google.

O'Grady went on to say these three tech giants negatively impact workers by not paying their fair share of taxes.

They are joined by Uber and Amazon, who exploit workers, O'Grady claimed.

She says they are "washing their hands" of the employer-employee relationship.

"When I speak to those young workers of Sports Direct, McDonalds or Amazon, they feel pretty alone in the world.

"They are facing employers that are far, far more powerful than the dockers' ones and need somebody to stand by their side and speak up for their rights.

"I would hope the Church can play a role."

The Vatican meeting O'Grady was addressing was organised by Cardinal Peter Turkston, who leads the Vatican's newly formed social action department.

The meeting's aim was to hear testimony of injustices suffered by working people and to consider how trade unions and the church can work together to achieve greater social justice.

In an advance press release, O'Grady said she would speak of young people she has met.

"This year I met the ‘McStrikers' - young fast-food workers at McDonald's, stuck on low pay and zero-hours contracts.

"Their demands are the same as the dockers nearly 130 years ago. They want a fair wage, guaranteed hours and recognition of their trade union...".

The press release continues:

"The church and the unions "share values of community, dignity and social solidarity … Together we can improve working lives and put dignity for working people ahead of market forces and freedom of capital.

"We can build a popular alliance for economic justice, in Britain and around the world."

Pope Francis has spoken against social injustice throughout his papacy.

In 2015 he denounced "the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature."

At that time, he called the unfettered pursuit of money "the dung of the devil".

Source

• The Tablet
• Catholic Herald
• The Irish Post
• The Guardian
• Image: Tarek Shelaby

The "new operating system" Rushkoff recommends turns out to be a variation on the fundamental vision of distributism - the wide, dispersed ownership and exchange of productive assets.

He is quick to reassure his readers that "we don't need to convert to Catholicism or even approve of Vatican doctrine" in order to appropriate their insights.

Rather, the value in the papal social encyclicals is that "they remember"; that is, they retain "a memory of the wheels of commerce that preceded the engines of the industrial age."

Rushkoff's book is particularly important for two reasons: first, he does not simply equate distributism with a back-to-the-land agrarianism, and second, he offers a way beyond the disturbing polarities that have emerged with Sanders, Trump, and Brexit.

This is because Rushkoff's book, while accessible, is not simple. Too often, debates about any topic get forced into a simple pro- and anti- polarity, focused on a single magic bullet (and often enough, a single demon to be expelled).

Worse, such debates too often "fight the last war" - and so Sanders's solutions look like a Scandinavian playbook, while Trump's yearn for a rebuilt manufacturing economy via protectionism and immigrant exclusion.

These solutions are not all wrong, especially in their diagnoses of what has happened - the Sanders/Trump alliance against trade deals evidences this. There is a "tell it like it is" attraction here.

Rushkoff's book, by contrast, insists on grappling with the present situation, which above all is one of massive technological change - higher minimum wages and barriers to foreign goods won't create jobs if robots can do them.

But this is not an anti-technology book; to borrow Pope Francis's phrase from Laudato Si', it's an anti-technocratic-paradigm book. In his encyclical, Francis insists that technology itself is not bad, but that it becomes problematic when it becomes an end in itself - which, as he goes on to say, means an end for those who stand to profit from it. When Francis claims that "technology is not neutral," he means that technological choices are in fact choices about "the kind of society we want." Continue reading

• David Cloutier is associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary's University and editor of catholicmoraltheology.com

But it's worth remembering that posing a question to a search engine is not the same as posing a question to any other kind of source.

The competition for authority online is governed by a very different set of rules than in previous contests for theological legitimacy; often, when people express doubt on the web, those most ready to answer will also be those most dogmatic in their beliefs.

Every so often, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz crunches Google search data for theNew York Times and comes up with some fun statistics about, say, the anxieties of pregnant women ("can pregnant women eat shrimp?" is a popular search query in the US).

This Sunday, Stephens-Davidowitz turned his attention to God.

Some of the patterns he documents are predictable, such as the steep reduction in "Google searches for churches," yet more evidence of the increasing number of "nones," or that "searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere."

Other patterns are more jarring: "Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell," he writes.

Each month, on average, 422 people in the US ask Google "Why did God make me ugly?" and 103 ask "Why did God make me black?"

The most common God-related question, asked over 25,000 times per month in the US, is "Who created God?," followed by that old Job-ian classic, "Why does God allow suffering?"

But we should be careful here; Google search data offers a skewed sliver of insight into the full range of human motivation and behavior. Continue reading

The Colmar Brunton national survey of 403 people aged 16 to 24 found that 64 per cent of young people said Google or other websites were the most common places their peers would go to "access information about sex, drugs, alcohol, depression, stress, health, etc".

Talking to friends came a distant second on 46 per cent.

"Our generation believes that the internet has all the answers," said 19-year-old Stevie Davis-Tana, an AUT student who serves on Waitemata District Health Board's youth advisory group.

"We believe that Google has all the answers to our beings, to everything that we need, and I think, as hard as it is to believe that young people would ask questions that you should be asking of a human being, they don't."

The 'State of the Generation' survey was commissioned by Youthline to prepare for its launch in July of a new Youthonline website called 'Yo!' The site will offer counselling by web chat or video and provide a social media space for young people to help each other from their own experiences.

Ms Davis-Tana said young people preferred to use the web because it was anonymous. Continue reading

Last year, we implanted the first bioengineered blood vessel, and it won't be long before we'll be able to print a liver for anyone who needs one.

Because the cost of printing will eventually be cheap enough for us to use the host's tissue, this also means we'll no longer have issues with the body rejecting the organ, since it'll be made from their very own cells.

It's amazing - nearly incomprehensible - as far as scientific developments go.

We're even growing tiny, embryonic brains in the lab: the most complex human organ, and the only reason they're not developing further is because they haven't been able to provide it with a continuous blood supply.

We're hurtling towards a point where we'll be able to artificially create every single part of the human body.

There's only one logical next step from there. Continue reading.

Source: The Wireless

Image: Cross-section of multi-cellular bioprinted human liver tissue, stained with hematoxylin & eosin (H&E) Organovo

Internet companies are a different breed. Because they traffic in speech — rather than, say, corn syrup or warplanes — they make decisions every day about what kind of expression is allowed where. And occasionally they come under pressure to explain how they decide, on whose laws and values they rely, and how they distinguish between toxic speech that must be taken down and that which can remain.

The storm over an incendiary anti-Islamic video posted on YouTube has stirred fresh debate on these issues. Google, which owns YouTube, restricted access to the video in Egypt and Libya, after the killing of a United States ambassador and three other Americans. Then, it pulled the plug on the video in five other countries, where the content violated local laws. Read more

Sources

• Somini Sengupta in The New York Times Sunday Review
• Image: GoodinBlogging

Somini Sengupta covers technology issues for The New York Times.

"I am afraid that Google can't distinguish between discrimination, tolerance and promotion," Fr. Maciej Zieba, the director of Krakow's Tertio Millennio Institute, told Catholic News Agency.

"In my opinion, it would be much better if Google with the same zeal will concentrate on violations of human rights in many countries of Asia and Africa where elementary human rights are violated."

Continue reading

Father William Grimm then asks the question: " If a machine that has no faith, no emotions, no aesthetic sense and no connection with the Church produces a translation that is indistinguishable from or even better than the official one, what does that say about the quality of the official translation or translators."

Read Deus ex machina by Fr William Grimm's article

Father William Grimm is a Tokyo-based priest and publisher of UCA News, and former editor-in-chief of "Katorikku Shimbun," Japan's Catholic weekly.

Image: UCA NEWS

In his opinion piece, Simon Jenkins suggests that we have mistaken electronic connection for genuine conversation. "Talk is reduced to the muttered, heads-down expletives brilliantly satirised in the BBC's Twenty Twelve," he says, "which psychologists have identified ... as 'fear of conversation'. People wear headphones as 'conversational avoidance devices'." While the internet connects us to the whole world, it is not the real world. When every fact can be checked on Google, "doubt and debate become trivial. There is no time for the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Socratic dialogue, the skeleton of true conversation".

He offers some practical suggestions about how to start a conversation as well as a list of conversation killers.

• Read Jenkins' article
• Image: Prade Films

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian as well as broadcasting for the BBC.

The significant drop is disturbing however and while we should be concerned, it's not a cause for panic, according Mark Gray a research associate at the Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate in Georgetown.

Gray created graphs from Google search statistics which used the term "Catholic" in them, such as "Catholic school," "Catholic Church," and "Catholic Charities." The graphs show a continued linear decline downward since 2004. The search volume dipped below average in 2007.

"Americans are significantly less likely to search for anything Catholic than they were seven years ago," he said at Nineteen Sixty-four, the research blog of CARA.

Declines are also evident in the U.K., Australia, Germany, Italy and Brazil.

Gray said his graphs represent the behavior of "millions of people (Catholic and non-Catholic) online."

"These aren't responses to polls or attitudes expressed in a focus group. These are real world observations. People are doing less of something and when that thing is 'Catholic' online we should wonder what the future is for Catholic news media."

Analysis of the Google search patterns for queries about the NFL, the Fox television show "American Idol" show no generalized downturn. Further context, comparing Catholic to Facebook was "no competition" he added.

One if four Americans is "Catholic".

Gray said, "Catholics are more likely to say they have visited a site for their parish or a Catholic school than any other religious or spiritual site and even then it's only about 5% of all adults for a six month period. Only a few Catholic websites (e.g., websites for the Vatican and the U.S. bishops) typically make it into the top 4,000 most visited in the United States."

Catholic search terms hit a low point each summer and peak in the weeks of Ash Wednesday and Christmas.

Sources

• Nineteen Sixty-four
• CNS

Hawking, diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease at 21, is now aged 69.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he told the Guardian newspaper. "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Hawking's comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, "The Grand Design" which provoked a backlash from religious leaders for arguing there was no need for a divine force to explain the creation of the universe.

Hawking joined others including the chancellor, George Osborne, and the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, at the Google Zeitgeist London event where he addressed the question: "Why are we here?"

His talk was focussed on M-theory, a broad mathematical framework that encompasses string theory, which is regarded by many physicists as the best hope yet of developing a theory of everything.

M-theory demands a universe with 11 dimensions, including a dimension of time and the three familiar spatial dimensions. The rest are curled up too small for us to see.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: Sound on Sight