Jigsaw: What do we know about Google's Internet combing special operations squad?

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an introduction

These days, content that supports the Palestinian cause is hitting the upper hand of Facebook's algorithms, which delete posts and ban accounts for criticizing Israel, so that thousands of Arabs had to try to circumvent these algorithms by dropping a letter or inserting symbols in the middle of certain words to avoid suspending their posts and suspending their accounts.

But what Facebook is doing is not alone in the Internet, as controlling electronic content in general is an increasing concern among major technology companies, led by Google, which established a special company to comb the Internet.

Article text

In the famous "Chelsea Market" building in the "Manhattan" area, and against the background of the noise of those coming to search for their favorite restaurant in one of the historic strongholds of the New York City food market, two years ago, employees of a new company called "Jigsaw" arrived, numbering no more than 100;

To occupy a commercial office above a fancy Italian ice cream parlor.

It's hardly surprising in a region where bureaucracy, media, and emerging tech companies have always crowded food stores with the longest history.

The wheel of food innovation continues its usual motion, as the chefs stomp through the corridors of Chelsea Market, but more complex and far-reaching innovations are being cooked up upstairs with the quieter sounds of programmers and engineers tapping their computers in the 8510 offices and the market itself, as the entire business block has become a company Google in 2018 in a deal that exceeded two billion dollars.[1]

As soon as the small Jigsaw team moved into their headquarters, they turned it upside down from a drab office to a creative space that looks almost like an art workshop were it not for the computers and desks lining the main foyer.

But another look at the walls of the headquarters may confuse visitors to Jigsaw, and make them think that they are in an office for political propaganda for a party or regime.

On one of the walls, propaganda posters from the twentieth century for the communist regimes in Cuba and North Korea, and drawings taken from the propaganda of the Islamic regime in Iran are intertwined. Other.

Jigsaw is just one branch of the larger internet giant, but it is a relatively newer and more controversial branch than the others.

The company was founded in 2010 as Google Ideas, led by Jared Cohen, a former employee of the US State Department, describing itself as a research center to consider the “intersection of technology and geopolitics”[3], and to expose the risks facing “open societies”, and of course These dangers are represented first in the totalitarian regimes that have dedicated the walls of their headquarters to their comic ads, in an attempt to stigmatize caricature or perhaps remind their employees of what the world could be like without their interference.

Jigsaw's small team is diligently working to create what they call a "safe world" free of extremism, false information and toxic ideas in the ever expanding and complex Internet[4], albeit inspiring and beautiful at first glance.

A long look at the projects that Jigsaw has implemented since its inception to “sweep” the Internet is enough to reveal many problems in the concepts and practices on which the company is based, concepts that it applies without any dialogue with the concerned parties, which is the largest in the Internet world.

Photo from Jigsaw headquarters in New York City (Source: Business Insider)

Jigsaw: The world as a technical puzzle

Christopher Hasson, a US Coast Guard lieutenant, sits at his computer searching through Google for answers to thorny questions in his head, thinking he has his own internet space away from the usual censorship in his organization.

Hasson opens the famous search engine and writes - although he has not previously said it with such clarity - "How can the white peoples rise up in the face of the Jews?"

The application used at the Coast Guard headquarters in Washington DC quickly alerted officials to Hasson's directions, and he was arrested, to find the authorities in possession of an assassination list of journalists, Democratic politicians and Supreme Court judges, as well as an assortment of weapons, to obtain a 13-year prison sentence for Planning for "white nationalist" terrorist attacks[5].

We don't know exactly whether Hasson planned it from the beginning, or whether the content he searched diligently contributed to his extremism and his tendency to plan assassinations, but his potential victims were lucky to work for an organization like Google that constantly monitors and checks its employees' computers, unlike the thousands who wander around the world. corners of the dark web and they enter the same questions into Google's engine without supervision, with the exception of Google, of course.

Google doesn't answer those complex questions full of bias and extremism as it does your regular questions as a user, like the boiling point of water or the best pizza parlor in Naples or the number of bird species in the Amazon, but it does open many ways for anyone to discover thousands more who have asked the same question. In his city, his country, and even his entire world, what makes those who ask these ordinary questions feel belonging to a wider circle they did not know before.

With this type of political question, Google allows, intentionally or not, to mobilize those researchers on the same topic, as a political group, for those who wanted this thing in the first place.

According to this given, Google becomes like the largest square in the virtual world, to which millions flock to when they get lost, but sometimes it is a point where people with similar political tendencies gather, randomly at first, and then regularly.

In parallel with the rise of the white right based on these networks, as Jigsaw tells us in the second issue of its magazine "The Current", which is devoted to covering the extremist right-wing organizations formed on the Internet[6], in parallel with that, another faction has been hunting down those looking for extremist religious content to draw them into orbit hundreds of miles away in the actual battlefields of the Middle East, a faction called the “Islamic State” or (ISIS).

A demonstration of a white right-wing group in the United States

In their article[7], researchers Ryan Greer and Vidya Ramalingam talk about the importance of search engines that have been on the throne of Google for some time;

Like Google's main engine or sub-engines on huge sites like YouTube and others, in contrast to spaces like Facebook and Twitter, participants are aware that they are addressing an audience, and they write their posts carefully to maintain that audience, a person's searches reveal their thoughts more deeply, revealing About the “tracks” of extremist content on the Internet, white, Islamic or otherwise, and any political goals that its makers are working on, if any.

However, Google did not stop here. Rather, it was inspired by the experience of ISIS and its returnees, an application it designed six years ago through the nascent Jigsaw company at the time, to become one of the company's first projects, an application called "The Redirect Method".

Jigsaw has developed an open source program called "Redirect Methodology" that picks up content that "extremists" usually search for on the Internet, and deliberately puts anti-content on its linked pages and search engine results.

In one of its experiments, as its official website describes, Jigsaw placed anti-extremism content in Arabic and English developed by two Lebanese and British companies, respectively, and it consisted of 116 videos distributed on pages that led to searches that “ISIS” used to attract fighters through, and that package of videos actually succeeded within eight weeks to draw the attention of more than three hundred thousand people to its content, with a total viewing time of half a million minutes[8].

To illustrate the idea further, let us review this example: If someone sat on Google searching for “the fatwa for jihad in Syria” or the names of clerics who publicly supported the “Islamic State” and invited people to join it, tailored ads would appear alongside their search results, leading them to video recordings discussing The legitimacy of the organization and the feasibility of joining it, video recordings of course recorded by Muslims opposed to the organization.

While the “redirection methodology” has proven its efficiency, at least in attracting users’ attention, according to Jasmine Green, director of research and development at Jigsaw[9], its current goal after the demise of “ISIS” in recent years has become white extremism within the United States. itself.

White extremism is not a challenge that threatens the United States from outside only with its now-known Russian connections, but it also constitutes the most prominent social challenge in its own home during this decade and the following, especially as this trend has brought a man like Donald Trump to the White House.

As the white issue at home has become the preoccupation of the American elite, instead of chasing down the strongholds of “terrorism” in the Middle East that it occupied in the past decade, in the midst of that, Jigsaw appears as a key element in the war of the American establishment and its ties to Silicon Valley over the “poisons” of white nationalism. .

Jigsaw office

A few years ago, Jigsaw launched Perspective,[10] an "anti-abuse" API that automatically detects spam, offensive or racist comments, quickly and automatically flags them, and then leaves the decision to delete them. Whether or not to the party that uses that interface.

In comparison, many employees in major media and social media organizations are “manually” filtering comments themselves until today, and in the midst of the torrential torrent of comments posted daily on these sites and platforms without censorship, completing the entire task becomes almost impossible.

Jigsaw developed this interface by training its automated model by inserting “toxic” comments models into it, until it was able to distinguish fairly between normal and “toxic” comments, and even categorize the toxicity of comments by a percentage.

As Wired points out, if that API receives the sentence “You are not nice”, the result will be that that sentence is “8% toxic”, but if the interface receives the sentence “You are a dirty woman”, the toxicity rate will jump to 92%. .

With the increasing use of the Jigsaw interface by many parties such as Wikipedia and The New York Times (its first users and co-developers)[11], the interface will allow modifications to its ratings according to the rating it obtains.

Not only that, but Jigsaw has had access to the massive archive of New York Times commentaries in its entirety, which he also uses to train the interface.

A picture from a wall of Jigsaw headquarters in New York

Of course, banning abusive comments cannot be considered an ugly goal, which is self-evident, but it brings with it complex technical and ethical questions, the first of which is who decides the “toxicity of comments” in the first place, as well as about the nature of machine interaction with our use of language, and whether automatic limitation and the possibility of The total elimination of abuse and extremism contributes to actually solving the problem, or exacerbates it by strengthening the sense of those who abuse that they are being targeted by centers of political and technological power.

With regard to artificial intelligence, Jigsaw will face the dilemma of using offensive words in sarcastic and humorous contexts among young people, for example, and the ability to automatically classify and delete them, as opposed to manual filtering of comments during which someone is aware of the complex use of language.

On the other hand, as a research paper published on the “Archiv” website shows, the API can easily be tricked with simple tweaks, passing on highly offensive and racist comments, and the simplest of those tricks is writing certain words incorrectly by increasing a letter or punctuation, but they remain legible and understandable Of course, to the human eye and mind.[12]

Jigsaw projects do not stop at "perspective" or redirection only, but also include "assembler", which helps detect fake images with "deepfake" technology [13], and "Project Shield" to protect opposition sites from denial-of-service attacks known for short “DDoS[14”], and “U” that allows journalists and activists in any country to bypass internet blocks and governments’ ability to monitor their computers, and Yasmine Green explicitly referred to Iran as a model targeted by “U-Proxy” to enhance communication between opponents of the regime there[15] .

Project Shield

Like the walls of their New York headquarters, Cohen or Green do not hesitate to clarify their directions, which, as they say, "align with those deprived of freedom of expression" and "keep the Internet a safe place away from the grip of authoritarian governments and the abuses of extremists alike", but they are biases that ignore the complexities of the real world. Which emits all these phenomena, and they are biases that hide hidden tendencies that make the right to comb the Internet that Google granted to itself an exclusive need to reconsider and dialogue with other partners in the world of the Internet, and in the real world that Google considers itself a giant of its giants driven by profit and ultimately interest , which does not lead us to believe in a conspiracy, but rather the necessity of subjecting Google and Jigsaw to a very critical critical look.

"California Effect"

In a sober article on the well-known site "Quartz", "Lucy Wark" wrote about Jigsaw and the problems surrounding it, and instead of falling in love with its projects or hating it wholesale, Lucy looked away to put Jigsaw in the context of a more general case in Silicon Valley, California, a case she calls Lucy With the "California Effect".

Referring to the British University of Westminster professors, Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook, who wrote in the mid-1990s about the “Ideology of California” and the “hippie” culture of the West Coast intertwined with the heavy tech industry there, a culture and ideology that “create a deep-rooted belief in the power of Information technology over human liberation,” a belief that solves technical puzzles but does not solve the problems of the concrete world.

In that coastal valley, executives indulge, not only in preaching that technological liberalism;

Rather, in the belief that the Internet space is a new world of their own making, and then their belief is accompanied by a sense of entitlement that justifies them to act as the emperors of this space, or what some critics believe is a form of colonialism, as Lucy points out [16].

And in Google in particular, and not others, the embodiment of this influence in view of the centrality it has acquired in the world of the Internet over the past two decades, as all its services have become our main “digital homes” from which we move and to.

The Internet, then, expands as if it is a civilization in its first phase, or a continent that has just been discovered, so we find kings and subjects without a contract regulating the relationship between the two parties, and with actual exclusive rights for the first discoverers at the expense of ordinary users, and from here comes the criticisms of the practices of Google and Jigsaw as "electronic colonization", and in that The colonial world gives Google executives the right to impose barriers and barricades that restrict the freedoms of users of the first search engine if they find this a danger to others, according to a classic liberal vision, as Lucy points out, which makes them “a logarithmic neutral mediator between users and the collective mind of the Internet,” as described by the thinker Evgeny Morozov, or neutral gods of the Internet, are in no way equal to the vast majority of its users.

This belief lies in their impartiality, that they see themselves as far from direct politics, and that they sit on the throne of a company that has devoted itself to providing the best that it has to the world away from governments constrained by their responsibilities and prejudices at the same time. A power and interest that places it at the heart of politics, and does not make it as it claims, the benevolent god of the Internet, who only wants a “free Internet for all,” despite what they give of unprecedented connectivity that allowed millions of limitless knowledge and the ability to mobilize intellectual and political mobilization that history has not seen before. .

However, one is puzzled about the political implications of that connectivity, and whether Google is willing to use its cyber power to influence some of those moves if it does not like it, based on its ownership of that space as an eventual product.

Jigsaw has so far only obstructed extremist agendas, but in the end it is constantly developing mechanisms that allow it to be used more widely at the push of a button on its part or on the part of its partners, and the line between the right-wing and the conservative on the one hand and the extremist on the one hand remains gray and controversial given the known biases of its executives. Google and Silicon Valley - which are among the reasons for the reservations of Republicans in the United States on the behavior of Google and its sisters in general - and to celebrate the leaps of technology and its ability to put obstacles on the road to violence and then to reserve the powers of the owners of that technology at the same time and demand that it be controlled by law are not contradictory positions, as he emphasizes. Morozov, as "

In November 2010, Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen and Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an article in the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine titled “Digital Disruption: Connectivity and Rampant Power.”

The two Google tycoons open their article by talking about the age of the Internet, the surprises it brings to governments around the world, and the small uprisings that a number of citizens can now make using their mobile phones alone.

The authors refer to the Iranian protests that took place a year before the article was published, in which Twitter played a pivotal role, the uprising in Moldova against election fraud in 2009, as well as the uprising of Uyghur activists in China in the same year.

Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt with a copy of their book "The New Digital Age" based on their Foreign Affairs article

The article was selective on several levels, the first of which is a list of the positive effects of technology in breaking the restrictions of totalitarian regimes over the course of the twentieth century, which chose points without others in the march of technology. The heyday of the television era, in which the vast majority of people did not seek to participate in its manufacture, and was dominated by states and then major companies.

The article was also selective in its dramatic review of the change that the Internet brought about in the equation for the benefit of peoples, without sufficient consideration of what it gave the regimes of new repressive tools that keep pace with enabling individuals everywhere and hovering over it, a selectivity that the two writers later realized when they published their most balanced book on the “Digital Age” The new” a few years later, and then followed it up with an article in the “Wall Street Journal” on the “dark side of the digital revolution” reviewing the possibilities that technology gives to totalitarian regimes in control and control[18].

Technology will also enhance the ability of companies to do the same, chief among them Google, but the questions about companies and their growing power are never asked with the same critical view.

But the company’s critics raise it, wondering what the internet represents for the concept of law, and the mechanisms by which internet giants can be brought under a legal framework to tame their powers.

Proposals were not formulated by a Marxist thinker, but were written by Francis Fukuyama himself in the magazine "Foreign Affairs" as well, as Fukuyama sees a threat to democracy from the unlimited power of technology, contradicting the romanticism of its makers.[19]

Also noteworthy is the selection of Schmidt and Cohen's article in his talk about the role of technology in protesting countries hostile to the United States and the "free and developed" world from the point of view of the authors of the article, and Silicon Valley in general, countries such as China, Cuba, Iran and the communist regimes.

Paradoxically, when the article mentioned non-democratic countries as well, but they are allies of the United States, its tone was mainly talking about the social (non-political) changes brought about by the Internet.

In Egypt, the use of the Internet breaks “traditional barriers of age, gender and social class”, in Pakistan there is praise for the increase in the number of mobile phone users to one hundred million, and in Kenya there are distinguished applications for transferring money via mobile, as well as in Afghanistan, where the Internet is not defective - in my opinion Cohen and Schmidt in their article - except for the ability of Taliban members to use it to carry out their "crimes" as they put it[20].

A few weeks after the publication of their historic article, accompanying the founding of Google Ideas (later Jigsaw), the Tunisian revolution erupted, igniting a spark that Egypt seized in January 2011, then Libya in February of the same year, and Syria, Yemen and Bahrain from after them.

The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were not only a surprise to their governments, but also to decision-makers in the West, and the owners of technological booms in Google itself, who did not see either country as a “dictatorship”, so the clash with civil society organizations was limited to attention to human rights files and freedom of the press, unlike Outright dictatorships (in their view) whose radical opposition was given dedicated tools.

When the Syrian revolution erupted in the face of a regime hostile to the United States (and of course a dictatorship), "Google Ideas" worked to come up with an application that helps draw a map of defectors from the regime to facilitate the communication of fighters there.[21]

When the Egyptian revolution broke out, there were no similar political interests in overthrowing the regime or not.

All that was left was that one of Google's founders angrily wondered why it was called the "Facebook revolution", and whether it would have been a "Google revolution" if Google had been producing the right product at the right time.

That's all there is to it.

Google - the opposite of what it sees itself - is just an ordinary company that was formed in exceptional circumstances (the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism) and created an exceptional market for increased information and communication, says historian and professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, "Siwa Wadianatan", a company that seeks to remain at the heart of the world that information and communication, which you consider "products"

Primarily before it considers their social or political prospects, and a company that now has competitors as well, and may make unethical choices to keep them away from its competition (they are many after the advent of Facebook and Twitter, and they sometimes give higher salaries, as Morozov sarcastically points out).

Finally, it is an American company in which former American diplomats participate, and their political biases remain with them, and on the walls of their offices as well.[22]

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