The term memory hole is derived from the prophetic dystopian story 1984 by George Orwell as we’ll see. In the culture war, to memory hole (verb) someone or something is to send them down the memory hole (noun) because they are politically incorrect or otherwise problematic. Sometimes memory holing involves replacing problematic facts with alternative facts. In some cases it is a matter of feelings over facts if those facts are triggering1. These problematic things/people are rectified, that is, they are changed, replaced or simply vaporized altogether and the memory hole is used to wipe away the memory. When people are memory holed, one might say they are unpersoned (verb), that is, rendered an unperson (noun).
Note, however, that the actual person’s physical form is not changed in real life when their appearance is changed in photos and film. If all records of their existence are sent down the memory hole they do not cease to exist or to have ever existed. But as far as '“history”, public record, libraries, museums, archives and so on are concerned, the person has been memory holed and the memory that they were memory holed is memory holed and so on.
Thus, it is as if they never existed. If reality is a collective hallucination as the antagonists in George Orwell’s 1984 and as critical theorists, cultural Marxists, postmodernists and others insist, then they never existed indeed. They assert that if people agree that 2 + 2 = 5 then 2 + 2 = 5. But this does not change the fact that 2 + 2 = 4. If I were to hold up 2 fingers and hold up an additional 2 fingers, I would be holding up 4 fingers no matter what anyone thinks or says. In 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith is tortured into agreeing that his torturer is holding up 5 fingers when in fact he is holding up 4. But this is not enough. He is tortured until he hallucinates that there are 5 upright fingers where there are actually 4.
Those who disagree that reality is independent of what the collective believes it is are invited to go for a hike to a cliff and, when no one is there to witness it, to jump off. If they survive, they can, in their anguish, console themselves that their pain does not exist since it is not part of the collective. If that doesn’t make the pain go away, they can re-evaluate their views of reality.
One is reminded of the story of the Zen student who meditates on his nose until it seems to disappear. When he runs to his master and says that he has discovered that his nose is just an illusion, the master punches him in the nose. As the student cries in pain, the master asks him, “If your nose is not there, what hurts?”.
A male with testicles may insist that they are a woman and that to say that he is a male with testicles is to engage in the hate crime of biological essentialism. But if he accidentally gets hit in the nuts, as he doubles over in pain, one might ask him, “If you don’t have testicles, what hurts?”.
All traces of something or someone may be memory holed but their reality remains indominable, free.
Memory Holing in Orwell’s 1984 & Animal Farm
In George Orwell’s novel 1984 (written in 1948, published in 1949), a memory hole is where things such as books, works of art, newspaper articles, documents, photographs and other records on archive are sent to be destroyed in fire along with the paper trail that would show that they were destroyed.
With this fiction, Orwell was warning readers about these practices being carried out in fact. In his 1984, as in the USSR, Communist China and so on, media such as books, films, records, documents, photos and people were altered or eliminated and records of their existence were erased.
Source: How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin’s Great Purge by History.com, captioned: “Nikolai Yezhov, pictured right of Stalin, was later removed from this photograph at the Moscow Canal. (Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images & AFP/GettyImages)”
Source: How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin’s Great Purge by History.com, captioned: “The famous photo of Soviet soldiers over Reichstag during the Battle of Berlin, which was later revealed to be staged and altered. (Credit: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)”
In Orwell’s earlier story, Animal Farm, published in 1945, the animals of a farm carry out a revolution and form a new government with publicly written rules painted broadside on a barn wall for all to see. After some time, some power hungry pigs had these rules altered in secret, under the cover of darkness. For example, “No animal shall drink alcohol” is secretly altered to, “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess”.
“No animal shall kill any other animal” is changed to, “No animal shall kill any other animal without just cause” and “All animals are equal” is changed to, “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”.
Because they are animals they are not sure if the rule had been different. Soon enough, any memories of any changes cease to exist. This was Orwell’s way of expressing how stupidly cattle-minded people are and how easily they forget the wrong-doings of authority unless they are reminded of it by people whom they try to memory hole for doing so (see Julian Assange, Alex Jones, Edward Snowden).
As Orwell tries to tell us in 1984, people’s minds are filled with trivial distractions like sports, sex and alcohol, leaving no room to question authority or to remember the blatant impeachable violations committed by the government. We all know that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself and we all know why he was murdered and what sort of sick practices are thereby allowed to continue. Who was brought to justice for this? Who even mentions it on TV? Who marches into the halls of power to demand justice? Who even remembers it happened? In forgetting this, we are allowing children to go on being raped.
Who remembers what Trump actually said about the white supremacists at the Unite the Right Rallyin Charlottesville? Who ever knew anything other than what he seems to have said in the edited clips that were aired on TV relentlessly? The same applies to endless other things Trump said (see Ivermectin, UV light).
Who remembers what happened at Wounded Knee? The Trail of Tears? Who ever knew about the incident at Oglala? The pre-meditated murders the government committed at Ruby Ridge? The White Water scandal? The Black Water scandal? What about Obama using drones to kill innocent people? Who even knows who Chris Dornerwas, let alone what was done to him?
Who remembers COINTELPRO? Union Carbide? The Iran-Contra scandal? Who knows what really happened in the JFK assassination in the Jonestown Massacre, in the Waco massacre? Ben Ghazi? Was Pearl Harbor a false flag? What about 911?
Here are some excerpts from 1984, Section One, IV wherein the memory hole comes into play. The main character, Winston Smith, works in a cubicle at records department of at the Ministry of Truth which was, of course, a branch of government that existed to deceive and manipulate the public.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
…
Winston dialed ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of ‘The Times’, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened…
…
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy…
…
Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain…
…
…in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away…Ampleforth…was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the huge printingshops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary... Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means...
…
…Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother’s Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC…
…
FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given…
…
…there had been no report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen…
…
…people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead…
…
…some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
Stalin didn’t have Photoshop, but that didn’t keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Using tools that now seem impossibly primitive, Soviet proto-Photoshoppers made “once-famous personalities vanish” and crafted photographs representing Stalin “as the only true friend, comrade, and successor to Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and founder of the USSR.”
One day a politician may have been in favor, the next he could be facing the firing squad as an enemy of the people. In the Soviet Union, people were literally written out of the history books by using photo manipulation techniques.
After he came to power in 1929, Stalin declared war on the Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him.
Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political “enemies.” Some 750,000 people died during the Great Purge, as it is now known, and more than a million others were banished to remote areas to do hard labor in gulags.
During the purges, many of Stalin’s enemies simply vanished from their homes. Others were executed in public after show trials. And since Stalin knew the value of photographs in both the historical record and his use of mass media to influence the Soviet Union, they often disappeared from photos, too.
This quasi-artisanal work, one of the more enjoyable tasks for the art department of publishing houses during those times, demanded serious dexterity with the scalpel, glue, paint, and airbrush. In this manner, Stalin could order written out of history such comrades he ultimately deemed disloyal (and who usually wound up executed as).
Sometimes, photo doctoring meant going back to the past to change the historical record, as when Stalin ordered Leon Trotsky, who helped create Communism, eliminated from all photos.
After Trotsky was exiled by Stalin for mounting a failed opposition to his leadership, the revolutionary was snipped, airbrushed, and covered up in countless photographs.
Sometimes, Stalin inserted himself in photos at key moments in history or had photo technicians make him look taller or more handsome. Here in this article, we have compiled a photo collection with such examples.
This picture was taken in 1926 and portrays Stalin with party bosses Nikolai Antipov, Sergey Kirov, and Nikolai Shvernik (from left to right). One by one, all except Stalin disappeared from the picture.
After all the photo manipulations done through the years, Stalin stands alone.
This historic picture showed young socialists in 1897 before some of them rose to power. You’ll recognize a young Vladimir Lenin (in the middle) – of course, he kept his place. Alexander Malchenko (standing, on the left) was not so lucky: in 1930 he was accused of being a spy, executed, and replaced with a white spot.
Here’s another case of embellishing a picture with extra details. Lenin was speaking to a crowd in 1920 but four years later, before publishing the image, the editors decided to make his audience bigger – so they used a larger crowd from another photo.
Lenin, who was turned into a kind of a Socialist saint after dying in 1924, remained a constant in all photos. But those who surrounded him were often not so fortunate. This group photo from 1920 contained so many “people’s enemies” (Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek – all shot in the 1930s) that the authorities cut it down to just Lenin and proletariat writer Maxim Gorky (behind Lenin, with the mustache).
In this photo from 1920, Trotsky, in a cap, stands nearby Lenin who is giving a speech from a tribune. In the later version, Trotsky is nowhere to be seen. Trotsky was exiled from the USSR in 1929 but he continued his political struggle against Stalin from abroad, before being assassinated by the Georgian’s henchman in 1940.
Airbrushing Soviet history was sometimes about adding aspects, not just deleting them. For instance, this picture from a 1917 demonstration was not considered revolutionary enough by the powers that be: the shop sign on the left says “Clocks. Gold and silver” and the text on a flag is unreadable. But hey presto, a little bit of Bolshevik magic later and the sign reads “You’ll take what’s yours through struggle” and the flag – “Down with the monarchy!”
The Black Memory Hole of the A.I. Cultural Revolution
It’s only a matter of time before 1984, in the ultimate twist of irony, has it’s own go with this. Someone will stalinize it and release and edition of it in the future.
There’s a reason why Orwell warned us of these things. Referring to the memory holing and unpersoning carried out in the Stalinization of the U.S.S.R., Styxhexenhammer666 adds,
You think they can’t do it now? Control over speech is more absent now than before but it’s also more technologically possible because people have compacted so much of that speech into a handful of websites.
As I write this, the worlds largest internet archive has been shot through with memory holes2. It is inevitable that those in power will seek to wipe away mass amounts of the past out of ideological bigotry. Webpages come and go. Archives are supposed to be forever. The cultural revolution ruins everything it touches The alteration of archives is as final as the infernal memory hole in 1984.
It will soon go beyond this. In 1984, there is the potential of individuals retaining printed books, photographs and other material that were memory holed. With the advent of A.I. designed by small-minded and biased authoritarians3, we can expect them to carry out a digital Inquisition to hunt down and memory hole people and things on a scale that will rival the cultural revolution in red China.
This is why we need paperback physical copies of books, this is why we need to store things digitally, remotely from any interference by others using removable storage, otherwise it can be stalinized just as easy, remotely, by a tech firm, by a government group that’s connected with the tech firm, potentially, etc., etc., etc.
Modern Examples of Memory Holing
The term is also applied to classical or traditional things, timeless classics, holiday films and songs that are removed/replaced to appease political correctness. We’ll look at some. Please leave a comment to call to our attention to cases we have thus far failed to include.
FBI, Twitter & Facebook Try to Memory Hole the Hunter Biden Scandal
Hunter Biden pursued lucrative deals involving China’s largest private energy company — including one that he said would be “interesting for me and my family,” emails obtained by The Post show.
One email sent to Biden on May 13, 2017, with the subject line “Expectations,” included details of “remuneration packages” for six people involved in an unspecified business venture.
Biden was identified as “Chair / Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC,” an apparent reference to the former Shanghai-based conglomerate CEFC China Energy Co.
His pay was pegged at “850” and the email also noted that “Hunter has some office expectations he will elaborate.”
The former Twitter executive and safety chief who played a key role in censoring The Post’s October 2020 exposé on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop has admitted it was a mistake — more than two years later while his onetime boss, Elon Musk, acknowledged Wednesday that the social media giant “has interfered in elections.”.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO at the time, admitted during a congressional hearing that blocking The Post’s report was a “total mistake.” csuarez
. . .
Musk has previously insisted full disclosure was needed to determine why the social media giant decided to block the bombshell report about President Biden’s son in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election.
At the time, Twitter had also locked The Post out of its account for more than two weeks because of baseless claims that the expose on the trove of emails discovered on Hunter’s laptop had used hacked information.
The 51-year-old Musk, who has vowed to turn Twitter into a bastion of free speech, has been teasing the release of internal files about the decision for several days, arguing that the “public deserves to know what really happened.”
“This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead,” he tweeted Monday after vowing the files were “soon to be published on Twitter itself.”
. . .
Twitter wasn’t the only social media platform to censor the bombshell report.
Facebook also took extraordinary measures to prevent people from sharing the article — a move founder Mark Zuckerberg later pinned on the FBI.
Twitter locked The Post out of its Twitter account because of baseless claims that the expose on the trove of emails discovered on Hunter's laptop had used hacked information.
Zuckerberg revealed in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan in August that Facebook moved to suppress the report in response to a vague FBI warning about possible “Russian propaganda” tied to the 2020 presidential election.
“Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert,’” Zuckerberg said.
“We just kind of thought: Hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement — they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.”
The tech titan said he couldn’t recall if the FBI had specifically warned about the Hunter laptop story.
Google Memory-Holes the Assassination Attempt on Trump
Now let’s see an apparently incriminating video posted by @fightwithmemes and many, many others on X. Substack and X are in some sort of cold war so we can not embed the video here. But you can click here to see it and/or view the screencaps below.
When we attempted it in the late afternoon of July 29, 2024, we saw “assassination attempt on Donald Trump” after typing “ass” (see below).
We apologize for the low grade screencap. We have no other choice because X stopped allowing X posts to be embedded in Substack due to some dispute over something.
Google has hidden autocomplete suggestions related to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. By removing autocomplete suggestions, the Masters of the World are trying to make it more difficult for users to access information about the attempt on Trump’s life. This is just the latest act of election interference by the internet giant.
Breitbart News tested Google’s search bar on Sunday, finding that typing in the words “assassination attempt” resulted in autocomplete suggestions of “truman,” “reagan,” “fidel castro,” “slovakia,” “bob marley,” “lenin,” “gerald ford,” “teddy roosevelt,” “saudi arabia,” “john paul ii,” and “franklin roosevelt.”
Taking it a step further by typing in “assassination attempt trum” — omitting only the last letter of President Trump’s surname — resulted in autocomplete suggestions of “truman,” “president truman,” and “harry truman.”
Moreover, when users type in the full spelling, “assassination attempt trump,” into Google’s search bar, no autocomplete suggestions appear.
Notably, President Trump survived an assassination attempt against him during his July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, after being shot in the ear by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was laying prone with a rifle atop a roof less than 500 feet from the 45th president.
Google is not the only entity shielding the public eye from what transpired in Butler.
The mainstream media, including CNN and Washington Post, reacted to the assassination attempt by producing dubious headlines that read, “Trump speech interrupted by Secret Service,” “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally,” “Trump escorted away after loud noises at Pa. rally,” and “Trump removed from stage after loud noises startles former president, crowd,” among others.
On Thursday, Newsweek published a false headline, titled, “Donald Trump Might Not Have Been Shot After All,” citing FBI Director Christopher Wray, who incorrectly stated, “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
As Breitbart News reported, claims that Trump was not struck by a bullet are false.
On Friday, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), also a former White House physician for 14 years, released a memo providing an update on Trump’s health. In his memo, Jackson also addressed Wray’s erroneous statement.
“There is absolutely no evidence that it was anything other than a bullet,” Jackson wrote. “Congress should correct the record as confirmed by both the hospital and myself. Director Wray is wrong and inappropriate to suggest anything else.”
As for Google and its clandestine search bar results, this is not the first time the tech giant appears to be censoring election-related content.
As Breitbart News reported last month, when searching for a candidate’s name with “presidential race 2024,” Google returned results for President Joe Biden’s campaign website at the top result, while President Trump’s campaign website did not appear on the first page.
Google has responded to Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and other top GOP figures’ accusations that the search engine is interfering in the election with its auto-complete results.
On Sunday evening, several X users posted photos showing that when they typed “assassination attempt on” into Google’s search engine, the website showed only auto-complete results for assassination attempts on former President Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, and other figures, omitting the July 14 attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life.
Even when Fortune typed in “assassination attempt on Trump” on Chrome using incognito mode, no auto-complete showed up on the results. Clicking “enter” on the result, however, yielded several recent news articles about the incident in Butler, Pa.
Elon Musk, who owns X, also weighed in, posting a photo of him searching for “President Donald,” which suggested “President Donald Duck” before “President Donald Trump.”
“Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump,” Musk posted. “Election interference?”
“Probably just a coincidence that Alphabet (Google) employees were the top donors to Biden,” he snarked in another X post.
Fortune—searching in incognito mode on Chrome—could not replicate Musk’s results: Auto-complete did not show any predictions on searches for “President Donald” or “President Trump.” Auto-complete also did not show any predictions for “President Joe” or “President Biden.”
Note how Fortune failed to not the time differential. Many of noticed the differences that were made over the course of the day. Fortune is being dishonest here; lying by omission. As we will see, even Google was honest enough to acknowledge what Fortune is being dishonest about here. They continue,
Several top GOP figures were enraged by the auto-complete results posted on X and immediately accused Google of “gaslighting” the American people and trying to influence the 2024 presidential election.
“Big Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris,” Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., wrote on X. “We all know this is intentional election interference from Google. Truly despicable.”
Google told Fortune that the company did not take “manual action” on the auto-complete predictions, and will be “working on improvements” to its auto-complete feature.
In terms of the assassination attempt queries, Google’s systems have “protections against Auto-complete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring,” the spokesperson wrote to Fortune. “We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up-to-date.”
As for the “Donald Duck” search that Musk highlighted, the spokesperson said that “auto-complete is currently not working as intended” in response to searches for the names of past presidents and the current vice president.
“We’re looking into these anomalies and working on improvements, which we hope to roll out soon,” the spokesperson said. “Our auto-complete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries.”
Barry Schwartz, an expert on online search and the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable, a news service about search engines, told Fortune that Google’s response “makes sense.”
“You can search wherever you want, and Google will show it to you, but it won’t do an auto-complete ‘suggestion’ that you do violence toward politicians,” he said.
Imagine if the attempt never happened, but typing in “assassination attempt on Tru” in Google suggested “assassination attempt on Trump,” Schwartz said: That would be encouraging violence.
But the attempt did happen, so Google should show autocompletion for that sentence, he added. In all likelihood, “they just didn’t update their filter,” he said—nothing more nefarious.
Tech giant Google has addressed concerns raised by prominent conservatives regarding its search autocomplete function, particularly its censorship of searches related to the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. The masters of the universe claims they are “working on improvements” including the autocomplete function.
They go on to discuss some of what we read above in the Fortune piece as Google. Later in their article, Breitbart adds,
The spokesperson further elaborated on the “Donald Duck” search highlighted by Musk, acknowledging that “auto-complete is currently not working as intended” for searches related to past presidents and the current vice president. Google assured that they are investigating these anomalies and working on improvements to be implemented soon.
The controversy has sparked a broader discussion about the role of technology companies in information dissemination and their potential influence on political discourse. Critics, including several top GOP figures, accused Google of “gaslighting” and attempting to influence the 2024 presidential election through their search results.
Google emphasized that their autocomplete systems are dynamic and that predictions change based on common and trending queries. The company stated its commitment to ensuring their systems are more up-to-date and responsive to current events while maintaining safeguards against promoting violence.
We should expect these attempts to memory hole and the attempts to rescue things from the memory hole by the Culture War Encyclopedia and others to be an escalating arms race as history evolves.
Below are the 2 images he shared in their full size.
Of course, these are images. They appear to be screencaps of a Wikipedia article that have subsequently been highlighted and on one case, underlined. On the left, the highlighted section reads, “Of Indian-Jamaican heritage” while on the right it’s, “Of Afro-Jamaicans and Irish-Jamaican Heritage”.
Of course, such images could be fakes, not true screencaps. One must fact-check such things. If we look at an archive from August 12, 2020 (the oldest I could find) of the Wikipedia page for Donald J. Harris, we see it states that he’s a “British Jamaican-born American” who was born 1938 in “Jamaica”. The word “black” does not appear in this version (August 12, 2020) of this page.
It seems that the next time the page was archived on September 26, 2020, and in this archived version, rather than being a
became the first Black scholar to be granted tenure in Stanford's Department of Economics
and that
at the University of California, Berkeley on a colonial Jamaican government scholarship in the fall of 1961.[36] Later in the fall of 1962, he spoke at a meeting of the Afro American Association—a students' group at Berkeley whose members would go on to establish the discipline of Black studies, propose the holiday of Kwanzaa, and help form the Black Panther Party.[36]
On the day that this sentence was being written (August 6, 2024), the Wikipedia page for Donald J. Harris, we see read a claim that he is “Jamaican-American”, that he was born in the Colony of Jamaica. According to Britannica, it was not until 1962 that,
Jamaica became independent with full dominion status within the Commonwealth, under a constitution that retained the British monarch as head of state.
