Maybe we should be concerned about Google and another type of diversity that is under threat?

David Powell
Aug 9, 2017 · 8 min read

There is a well-known way to deal with people who want to express concerns. Make it difficult to contact decision makers.

But if decision makers are going to fall silent, please give ordinary individuals the right to silence with no exceptions.

I had access to 200 senior Google email addresses as an intern at Google this summer. After raising concerns and receiving very little response, I stand by my decision to resign on 3 July this year due to ethical concerns.

Some complex questions

· Is it OK for Google to have a dominant market position in a country, which you may have to leave one day (when decisions about whether you will be accepted in another country may be discretionary)? (As an example of one country’s legislation, servers with your data are probably not held in the domestic country; surveillance of citizens outside the US is not fully covered by US privacy laws.)

· If you are living in such a country and wish to express a particular point of view, would you express your views online? Would you do so if you believed that there was a risk that it might upset the authorities of a country — and this country may one day be your last safe-haven?

· If such a country receives defence and security support from ‘the world’s largest economy’, would the authorities of these counties really have the guts to challenge Google if someone claimed it is necessary to intervene against Google (or to try to access Google’s servers — even if abroad — to investigate a complaint)?

My experience in the UK

One such country referred to above might be the world’s ‘fifth largest economy’. Yes, with all the safeguards of a House of Lords, with some individuals who have significant assets, who should be able to guarantee their own ability to travel abroad and their own private healthcare.

A couple of years ago, I stood in a suit with a placard on Parliament Square, protesting about how psychiatry was used in the UK. I was approached by 8 officials, who eventually told me I had to move as the area I was standing was ‘private property’.

I was told to stand on a busy pavement, where I would clearly irritate pedestrians. So, realizing that I would annoy more people than get my message across, I moved away.

Many people are probably fed up with people trying to give them leaflets on the street. Much better to organize or campaign for an event on Facebook?

Over the years, I have sent several postal letters to Liberty, The Supreme Court, The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the Justice Minister and 90% of members of both Houses of Parliament. I applied to Rethink, but received no response.

When a man did eventually come out of the NICE building, I was advised to approach the Ministry of Justice. Someone standing outside NICE with a mask was told by a lady who worked in this area ‘I don’t like people wearing masks’.

As someone who has served in a student society once described as ‘the last bastion of free speech in the Western World’, I ask you to take people who wear masks seriously. Do not expect that people in masks can give you an answer to all your questions, or that you can find what they are concerned about online. Someone may be too scared to tell you anything as they understand that if you say anything, you might enter certain keywords later on your phone.

Back to diversity

‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’

My slogan is ‘I would campaign for years for the right of a woman or a man to be in a public place with a placard without being taken away to a mental hospital or placed on a Community Treatment Order.’

After many years my voice is hoarse.

You may find this article slightly incoherent, discussing several different issues at once. But I want to cover a lot in this article so you get close to a full picture. I hope that after reading this text several times, you may be able to infer some of what I am worried about.

Now to Google. I resigned after seeing a Google ad for antipsychotic drugs to treat ‘schizophrenia’. Why is this issue so significant? And what has it got to do with diversity?

One of the arguments made for Google’s decision to fire one of its employees was that Google wanted to foster an environment where people are not intimidated from expressing their opinions. I believe Google is perpetuating misleading ‘scientific’ evidence and that some people are therefore too concerned to express their opinions.

Surely, we have an open democracy and the ability to form meetings without using the internet?

As an experiment, I stood on the street talking to people and gave out 600 cards inviting people to a discussion on Saturday in central Warsaw about an alternative search engine and tackling issues to do with psychiatric treatment. I even collected 25 email addresses. But without a Facebook page for the event, no one turned up.

So, some of the protestors are on their own or without jobs. However, many of us were educated that a large proportion of homeless people have ‘mental health problems’.

It was not long ago that (as is publicly reported) antipsychotic drugs were used to punish people with undesirable opinions under the former Soviet Union.

This is the diversity issue I am concerned about. To be able to express your opinion without intimidation.

But in today’s world, people live in awe at the idea of ‘objective scientific evidence’.

If you go to Google you can find rankings of ‘expert’ institutions and many articles in scientific journals about psychiatry. If you try to ‘help’ a homeless person by contacting a ‘mental health’ helpline, you can probably comfort yourself that you did the right thing backed up by information on Google and Facebook.

I have written a piece about why I resigned from Google and why ordinary search results do not provide objective information in this area (https://www.quora.com/Are-Google-search-results-objective). Here is some of it:

“Having a distinction between Google ads and ordinary search results can give you a false sense of security. You may think that the prioritization of Google’s search results is based on objective factors such as the number of links other sites have made to this site. In the early days of volunteer bloggers, this might have been one method for seeing which sites were the most popular.

“But if some websites are able to pay for Google ads and people start sharing the links of these Google ads, then the more likely that their site is likely to show up in ordinary searches.

“This makes paying for ads doubly effective. You not only come up at the top of the page in an ad, but your site also comes higher in the ordinary search results. So, you can effectively pay with the result that you come up higher in search results if others share the links to your ad, as I noticed happening with the site from this Google ad in different languages.”

I have also spent significant amounts of money visiting Kiev and sending letters from the working group of NGOs (which I worked weeks to form) to decision makers in Ukraine by registered post. I was invited by some cash-strapped NGOs because decisions are being taken about psychiatric policy for many years to come. I had seen how people in psychoneurological institutions were suffering from these medications. When I negotiated with one institution psychiatrist to reduce the injections for some detained individuals (which the institution had bought from a Western company spending a significant portion of their budget), the individuals, who had been receiving the injections, were very grateful.

The Google Warsaw office may seem very far away from this institution hundreds of miles away from Kiev. However, even in the countryside in Ukraine, Google may be the first-place people go to search for objective information. After looking at the top search results, staff can reassure themselves that the suffering they are imposing is acceptable. Once again, you can read my article about Google’s search algorithm here (https://www.quora.com/Are-Google-search-results-objective).

After resigning from Google, I received a call from HR of one of Europe’s 20 largest companies (by revenue) asking me to resign my second internship that I was due to start later that year. The explanation I was given was confusing, including the idea that the academic institution, where I was due to study, a 300-year old Russian university, was ‘not a target school’. Perhaps this Russian university had not spent enough on marketing or Search Engine Optimization.

Silence and silence

After resigning from Google, I posted two criticisms about Google in the MBA intern group, which I have now been removed from. I wrote to five interns I was acquainted with trying to explain my decision to resign. They have not yet responded to me. When at Google, they responded to me within minutes. It appears I am cut off from any discussions about problems. These are MBA students with the protection of having a network of people from over 50 countries in the world.

In so far as my approach so far does not seem to be succeeding as I would have liked, I ask that individuals in the House of Lords, who have significant means, make their email addresses available online so that a 32-year old, who is currently living abroad is able to send them his concerns. This same individual caused himself financial problems by sending letters by post on such an issue just under 4 years ago.

After I raised competition concerns, the UK Competition and Markets Authority wrote back saying, “You will appreciate that, like any public authority, we have finite resources so we have to prioritise which cases we pursue.”

In the UK, the channels for making complaints is limited. It is possible to take time off work to attend an MP surgery. My MP helped my alarmed letter be forwarded to the Law Commission. The QC in charge wrote back to me that my concerns had not reached the top of the list for issues to be considered.

But the simple right I am arguing for is fundamental to our democracy. Anyone who is detained should have the right to choose to remain detained and to refuse psychiatric treatment.

If someone goes on a hunger strike or falls silent in a mental hospital, this will most likely be used as a justification for increased psychiatric treatment.

Today, as in the 1530s in England, silence does not provide protection from unpleasant treatments.

The fact that you are able to read this article may lead you to the belief that everything is OK with free speech in the world. I am not disclosing everything in this article, but let’s just take a step back and think about the economics of information distribution. As a starting point, it would be nice if some decision makers in the UK were more critical and less susceptible to lobbying and influence of companies with significant marketing resources.