USA Today: 'Browsing Books Can Lead to Extremist Rabbit Hole'

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Apr. 30, 2021

Browsing books can lead people down an "extremist rabbit hole," warns USA Today's Jessica Guynn.

From USA Today, "Is Amazon recommending books on QAnon and white nationalism? Browsing books can lead to extremist rabbit hole":

Amazon's book recommendation algorithms that help customers discover new titles may have a dark side.

A new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue says these algorithms steer people to books about conspiracy theories and extremism, sometimes introducing them to the work of conspiracy theorists who've been banned by other online platforms.

People browsing a book about one conspiracy on Amazon are likely to get suggestions for more books on that topic as well as books about other conspiracy theories about everything from QAnon to the COVID-19 vaccine, the report found.

Wow, really groundbreaking stuff.

In a statement to USA TODAY, Amazon said: "We take concerns from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue seriously and are committed to providing a positive experience for our customers. Similar to other stores that sell books, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints and our shopping and discovery tools are not designed to generate results oriented to a specific point of view."

Translation: thanks for tipping us off (as an unpaid intern) to these thought criminals so we can add them to our massive list of banned books.

USA Today's warning against "browsing books" follows the New York Times' recent warning against "critical thinking."

Reading and critical thinking can lead to right-wing extremism so it's best for people to just binge-watch Netflix all day.

As USA Today's "senior tech writer," Jessica Guynn's job is to demand widespread censorship of everything our ruling oligarchs don't like.

Guynn's previous column called for Facebook to ban "lies" about George Floyd's "murder," such as the claim he died of an "overdose."

"Avaaz [a pro-censorship activist group] uncovered 65 posts pushing 15 false narratives on Floyd's murder, including that his death was staged or was filmed before COVID-19, that he died of an overdose and those involved in his arrest were crisis actors, that had an estimated 3.4 million views," Guynn said. "It flagged the posts for Facebook in September."

Guynn was a co-author of the article Glenn Greenwald recently panned that called for Capitol protesters to be blocked from raising funds for a legal defense.

And then, once they did this grotesque bullying, they declared - in the most sexist way possible - that the journalist that *they* chose as the lead reporter, whose name was first in the byline, is such a fragile young girl that no criticism is warranted: it's abuse. pic.twitter.com/ByV4xkh9VI
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 29, 2021

Here's some more highlights of Guynn's invaluable work:

What would we do without such quality journalism???

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