Americans Are More Likely to Be Killed by Right-Wing Terrorists Than Muslims—But the Media's Afraid to Say It

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AlterNet / By CJ Werleman

Americans Are More Likely to Be Killed by Right-Wing Terrorists Than Muslims—But the Media's Afraid to Say It

We must confront the threat of far right extremism.

May 20, 2014

When Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) labeled cattle rancher and right-wing extremist Cliven Bundy a “domestic terrorist,” the far Right went into an apoplectic state. But the Senate majority leader may have unwittingly stumbled upon an interesting and sobering fact: that when it comes to domestic terrorism, you are far more likely to be murdered by a far Right-wing American than a Muslim American, but the term “terrorist” remains reserved exclusively for acts of political violence carried out by Muslims.

If terrorism is defined as violence against innocent civilians designed to advance a political cause, then all racist murders that occur in the U.S. are also acts of terrorism, because the perpetrators commit the violent act to send a political message to minority communities (i.e. intimidate them into a subordinate status.)

Arun Kundani, adjunct professor at New York University and author of The Muslims are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the War on Terror, writes: “The definition of terrorism is never applied consistently, because to do so would mean the condemnatory power of the term would have to be applied to our violence as much as theirs, thereby defeating the word’s usefulness.”

Violence carried out by far Right groups or individuals, which have racism as a central component of their ideology, is of similar magnitude to that of Jihadist violence. In the years 1990 to 2010, there were 145 acts of political violence committed by the American far Right, resulting in 348 deaths. By comparison, 20 Americans were killed over the same period in acts of political violence carried out by Muslim-American civilians.

“Both categories of violence represent threats to democratic values from fellow citizens. Whereas the former uses violence to foment a change in the ethnic makeup of Western countries or to defend racial supremacy, the latter uses violence to try to intimidate Western governments into changing foreign policies. Ultimately, to be more concerned about one domestic threat of violence rather than the other implies governments and mainstream journalists consider foreign policies more sacrosanct than the security of minority citizens,” writes Kundani.

It has now been 13 years since al Qaeda and its associated forces have carried out a successful attack inside the United States. National security analyst and regular CNN contributor Peter Bergen asks, “Given this, it becomes harder to explain, in terms of American national security, why violence by homegrown right-wing extremists receives substantially less attention than does violence by homegrown jihadist militants?”

To that point, right-wing extremists have carried out a great number of high profile acts of political violence since 9/11, from the shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, to the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Attacks that have garnered fewer headlines include the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller, who ran an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. His killer was tied to a number of far right-wing groups, including Sovereign Citizens, a neo-confederate movement who deny the powers of the federal government.

In a recent op-ed, Bergen juxtaposes the media and national security attention devoted to the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing to last month’s shootings at a Jewish Community Center in greater Kansas City. On the latter, Frazier Glenn Cross, who founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, shot and killed a 14-year-old boy and his grandfather, and one other. After being taken into custody, Cross shouted, “Heil Hitler.” In both respective attacks in Kansas and Boston, three Americans were killed.

“Now let's do the thought experiment in which instead of shouting "Heil Hitler" after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted "Allah Akbar." Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received,” observes Bergen.

John Mueller, who is a political scientist in the field of international relations, illustrates how our conception of the terrorist threat is shaped more by ideology than objectivity: “In almost all years the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.”

Despite the far Right’s history of deadly violence, it is jihadist violence that continues to dominate media headlines and the attention of policy makers. The Southern Poverty Law Center calculates there are 939 far right-wing hate groups across the country today, including neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, border vigilantes and others.

“Since 2000, the number of hate groups has increased by 56 percent. This surge has been fueled by anger and fear over the nation’s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation’s first African-American president…. The number of Patriot groups, including armed militias, skyrocketed following the election of President Obama in 2008 – rising 813 percent, from 149 groups in 2008 to an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012. The number fell to 1,096 in 2013,” the SPLC calculates.

Yet terrorism and racist violence are not considered to be equally significant threats by the U.S. government and the mainstream media. “When CNN’s John King commented that the person arrested for the Boston attack had been identified as a ‘dark-skinned man,’ it was not just an individual gaffe, but the making explicit of the racial subtext to the entire discourse of counterterrorism. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews asked his terrorism expert guests whether government analysts would be able to tell from the surveillance images of the suspects if they were ‘from Yemen or other parts like that.’ The suspect’s face was being asked to reveal a racial identity that would, in turn, tell us whether he was one of ‘them’ or one of ‘us,’ and therefore what kind of emotional response to the bombing would be appropriate,” writes Kundani.

Dangerously, not only is the mainstream media shy in labeling right wing extremist groups as “domestic terrorists,” but also so is the government. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report warning of violent right-wing extremism. The report had merely pointed out that some domestic extremists focused on single issues like immigration and abortion were interested in recruiting military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Conservative columnists cried blue bloody murder, and in the face of political controversy, the report was retracted.

In a 2011 interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Daryl Johnson, the leader of the team that produced the report, argued that following the controversy, the Department of Homeland Security’s examination of such threats suffered, stating: "Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism—whether it's anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, 'sovereign citizens,' eco-terrorists, the whole gamut."

Like the violent acts we normally think of as terrorism, racist violence not only takes the lives of its immediate victims, but also sends a larger message of fear to the wider population. “In dedicating tens of billions of dollars a year to fighting a domestic threat of terrorist violence that is largely imagined, the U.S. government has neglected the challenge of creating a genuinely peaceful society. An ideologically-driven focus on Muslim Americans as the prime threat of violence goes hand in hand with a normalization of the fact that the in the U.S., 15,000 people are murdered each year,” writes Kundani.

The growth in far Right extremism is fueled not only by a right-wing echo chamber that legitimizes false propaganda about immigrants and other minorities, but also, in part, by liberal timidity, which is why Sen. Reid’s use of the term “domestic terrorist” is an important step forward in dealing with the threat of far Right extremism. I mean, terrorism.

CJ Werleman is the author of "Crucifying America," and "God Hates You. Hate Him Back." Follow him on Twitter: @cjwerleman

Google’s Snoops: Mining Our Data for Profit and Pleasure

A Quarterly of Politics and Culture

Google’s Snoops: Mining Our Data for Profit and Pleasure

At the Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA (Denis Capellin/Flickr)

By Robert Epstein - May 9, 2014 

  

There was a running gag among fellow workers where we would walk by each other and whisper “Don’t be evil, pft!” and roll our eyes.
–Former Google employee

Google’s publicists have been working extra hard this year. Edward Snowden’s revelations have made the company look like a pawn of the NSA; Google Glass has been drawing the ire of privacy advocates around the world; and in two separate lawsuits, both of which are now moving forward over Google’s strong objections, the company has been accused of wiretapping. The first suit is testing the legality of the company’s practice (now supposedly discontinued) of collecting information from private Wi-Fi networks using its Street View vehicles, and the second is challenging its ongoing practice of analyzing the contents of all emails sent and received by Gmail users. The company defends its practice of scanning emails as a means of gathering information it uses to send people targeted ads.

Although wide-ranging, the revelations and lawsuits are overlooking an important aspect of Google’s activities that is especially worrisome—the human element. It’s not just Google’s computers that have access to those emails; employees do too, and that introduces troubling possibilities that go far beyond the mundane world of targeted advertising. Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning were just low-level workers when they got ideas. What kinds of crazy notions might be popping into the heads of the 30,000 prodigies at Google, Inc.?

I am singling out Google here, as opposed to other high-tech giants like Facebook, or, for that matter, the NSA itself, because Google has a unique business model that gives it unfettered access to and control over immensely rich individual “profiles” of information on a scale that is unprecedented. The model is exquisitely simple and sublimely deceptive: We give you free services that you are likely to use dozens of times a day while we invisibly track and record everything you do. Based on what we have learned about you, we then charge advertisers premium fees to reach exactly the right buyers for their products and services.

“Google’s dance,” as I have called it in previous writings, lies in masking the company’s business model behind the endless array of free services. On the surface, Google appears primarily to be an information provider, but it is actually a glorified advertising firm, with 97 percent of its revenues coming from advertisers. Users see only the surface, which they love, but would they be so enamored if they were more aware of what the surface was for?

Twenty-four hours a day, across more than sixty free product “platforms” such as Gmail, the Google search engine, YouTube, Google Plus, Google Maps, Street View, and Google Wallet, the company is storing, indexing, and cross-referencing information about the beliefs, tastes, and activities of a billion people—including you—and not just when you are online. If you have the Android system on your mobile device, Google can track you even if you are innocently reading your ePub version of The Motorcycle Diaries. If you use Google Voice, your calls are transcribed, analyzed, indexed, and added to your profile, just as if they were Gmails. And if, in the near future, you find yourself within spitting distance of someone wearing Google Glass, beware: what you do and say can be recorded. Think J. Edgar Hoover multiplied by, well, a google (that’s a 1 with 100 zeros after it). No other company aggregates so much individual data so aggressively, competently, and invisibly.

Just how much data does Google actually have about you? If you are active in the digital world, it probably has the equivalent of filing cabinets full—but what, exactly, is in those drawers? Google won’t say. The content is private, and Google’s privacy, unlike yours, is sacrosanct.

Google appears primarily to be an information provider, but it is actually a glorified advertising firm, with 97 percent of its revenues coming from advertisers.

Once you unknowingly give them information about yourself—even search terms you never typed fully, or draft emails you never actually sent—it is their property, which, according to their Terms of Service Agreement (to which you automatically assent when you use any Google product, even if you don’t know you’re using a Google product), they can share that information, at their discretion, with “those we work with”—or just about any agency or individual if the company has a “good faith” belief that doing so is required by law or will “protect . . . the rights, property or safety of Google.”

But not with you. Unless regulation requires it—and so far, none does—the company will never share information about you with you. Needless to say, you also have no way to spot or remove incorrect information that may have found its way into your file drawers. Many Google employees, on the other hand—especially the whiz kids on the data mining teams—can look at your personal detritus all they want.

What could possibly go wrong?

Let’s think about this in general terms, or at least in psychological terms (that’s my field). How would people behave who had easy access to the private emails of hundreds of millions of people, including those written by their ex-spouses, childhood crushes, favorite celebrities, and least favorite politicians? Would they peek now and then? And if they found some juicy tidbits, would they sometimes joke about them with office mates? If they found some serious dirt on the jerk who bullied them in high school or the blowhard right-wing congressman who is ruining America, would they be tempted to leak some info to the Guardian or the FBI?

And what if they could also view, in real time, which search terms people were using and which websites people were visiting, along with a record of all the search terms people had ever used and all the websites people had ever visited?

What if, with a few keystrokes, they could alter the contents of a dossier to make a competitor look like a pedophile or push their friends’ websites onto the treasured first page of search rankings—maybe even influence the outcome of a close election by making search rankings favor one candidate?

What if you were sitting at that desk and controlling that keyboard? Would you occasionally peek, if only to take a break from the daily grind? Would you do harmless favors for friends and family members? Would you try now and then to help the world in some small way?

Of course you would.

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Pertinent here is a little-known 2011 book that presents a fictionalized account of the lives of Google software engineers. Written by Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff research scientist at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, The Silicon Jungle tells an unsettling story about Stephen Thorpe, an over-the-hill programmer who competes with thousands of college-age geniuses to land one of those coveted summer internships at. . . well, Google, really, even though Baluja pretends it’s not. I’ll call it “eGoogle,” for “ersatz Google.”

Unlike Dave Egger’s recent Google-bashing novel, The Circle, Jungle is by a knowledgeable insider. Baluja has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon and used to be chief scientist at Lycos. He has also worked for Google for more than ten years, and, he tells me, has been prohibited by the company from talking about his book publicly—which is probably why you’ve never heard of it.

Here are a few important features of the culture at eGoogle, some almost dizzying in their implications:

Interns on the data mining teams necessarily have access to all eGoogle data, as do many other eGoogle employees. They need this access because their job is to find hundreds of thousands of new customers for high-rolling eGoogle customers who sell everything from ulcer medications to umbrellas. To guarantee the sale of just about anything, the interns write programs that scan the emails, search histories, and purchase histories of a billion people.

In other words, they are really mining for gold, although Baluja emphasizes that they see the challenges they are given as academic exercises; they are completely oblivious to the millions of dollars eGoogle rakes in with every new program they write. eGoogle is careful, Baluja says, to house the programmers and the accountants in separate buildings and to make sure they never meet.

What if you could view, in real time, which search terms people were using and which websites people were visiting, along with a record of all the search terms people had ever used and all the websites people had ever visited?

When the programmers are not filling coffers, they are scanning eGoogle’s massive databases for racy emails and pining over the private emails of ex-girlfriends, especially the emails with nude photos attached. When an especially titillating pic turns up, they display it on massive overhead screens for coworkers to admire. At eGoogle, everything is spectacular, even the perversions.

When, one evening, an intern is monitoring his ex-girlfriend’s online chats, he learns of a steamy party not far from the eGoogle campus, and four of the most lecherous of the interns are off and running. (We later learn who got lucky.)

Back on “campus,” one intern is made a full-time employee on the spot when he develops an app that allows eGoogle employees to zoom in on neighborhoods using eGoogle’s version of Google Earth and view, house by house, what kinds of activities people are engaged in online. When people are emailing, the houses light up brown; when they’re viewing porn, the houses light up pink. The app is an instant sensation among eGoogle employees, who are eager to see, godlike, which of their neighbors are being naughty.

Stephen’s girlfriend, meanwhile, is trying to get her doctorate at Brown University by monitoring conversations of radical Islamists on a website she’s created, but she can’t get any traffic. After Stephen mentions her dilemma to a fellow intern—one on a search-engine team—her website suddenly jumps up a gazillion slots in eGoogle search rankings, and thousands of prospective suicide bombers sign on.

The plot thickens when Stephen starts mining data for an executive at a nonprofit organization. The executive asks him to search eGoogle’s data for innocent people who are likely to turn up mistakenly on government watch lists, claiming his organization is going to help them protect themselves from overzealous government bureaucrats. Using the same techniques he uses to find widget buyers, Stephen quickly generates a list of 5,000 ideal watch-list candidates, which the scheming executive promptly sells for a seven-figure sum to Arab terrorists.

When government spooks figure out what Stephen has been doing, they make him an offer he can’t refuse: a lifetime of indentured servitude at a secret government research facility where there is no free food, the computers are clunky, and the databases are pathetically small. It’s either that or prison. How, he muses at the end of the book, can the United States ever win the war on terror when the government’s data processing resources are so paltry?

That’s the only thing Baluja gets wrong. Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s access to the databases of Google, Microsoft, and other companies were inconceivable when The Silicon Jungle was published. Baluja tells us about individual eGoogle employees who routinely feed data to the feds, but he insists that large-scale data sharing would never be allowed by eGoogle executives. Snowden’s disclosures, which apparently are still not complete, remind us that no digital data are ever really private—that data are always vulnerable to the wiles of determined individuals or organizations.

There is also one aspect of Baluja’s tale that is ludicrous on its face, and that is his disclaimer in the book’s introduction that eGoogle (which he actually calls “Ubatoo”) isn’t really Google. In both form and function, it certainly looks like Google, and Baluja also acknowledges that the “temptations, . . . ability, brains, and computational power” necessary to do the kinds of mischief he describes are real.   

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Google’s privacy violations vary from the petty and mundane to the truly spectacular. On the mundane side, in July 2010, a careless twenty-seven-year-old software engineer named David Barksdale was fired by Google for spying on at least four underage teens through their various Google accounts. While still employed, according to a September 2010 report by Gawker.com, he showed a friend the power he had over private information by pulling up his friend’s “email account, contact list, chat transcripts, Google Voice call logs—even a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn’t think were linked to his main account—in seconds.”

Why isn’t your massive personal profile heavily encrypted so prying eyes can’t see it—or at least not “in seconds”? Public statements in recent years by senior Google employees explain why. According to Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, “we couldn’t run our system if everything in it were encrypted because then we wouldn’t know which ads to show you.” In other words, their business model depends on lightning-quick connections between the insecure data in your digital filing cabinet and the ads supplied by their paying customers, which makes your data easy pickings for rutting David Barksdales.

In July 2010, a careless twenty-seven-year-old software engineer named David Barksdale was fired by Google for spying on at least four underage teens through their various Google accounts.

I have been a programmer most of my life and a research psychologist for more than thirty years. I can tell you with certainty that the kinds of questionable activities Baluja describes are not only plausible but inevitable in the hyper-casual high-tech environment Google maintains, no matter what internal rules may be in place. Google openly takes pride in hiring independent thinkers and letting them frolic; software engineers are officially allowed to play a whopping 20 percent of their work time. In that kind of world, anyone with sufficient password authority or technical expertise can do exactly the kinds of things Baluja depicts—and worse.

When it was revealed in 2010 that Google Street View vehicles had been secretly collecting personal information from personal Wi-Fi networks in more than thirty countries for several years, the company claimed that this was a pet project of a single software engineer—Marius Milner. Although outed in 2012, Milner, who identifies his profession as “hacker” on LinkedIn, is still employed by Google.

Its public denials notwithstanding, Google has, from the top down, consistently shown little respect for privacy. In 2009, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, expressed the philosophy that drives the enterprise: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” In other words, all information is fair game.

This helps explain projects like Buzz, a social network service that Google unveiled in 2010. Without anyone’s permission, the company instantly created an online community intended to overwhelm Facebook, just as its Gmail rollout had quickly overwhelmed Hotmail and Yahoo. The company created Facebook-like pages, already complete with friends, based on who its Gmail users—175 million of them at the time—emailed most frequently. People were so outraged by this blatant incursion into their personal lives that the platform was shut down after eighteen months.

Perhaps more outrageous, it was revealed in 2012 that Google engineers had for several years been hacking into Apple’s Safari browser, allowing them to surreptitiously monitor the search activities of millions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users. For that little caper, Google was fined $22.5 million by the FTC—the largest fine in the agency’s history.

Comments like Schmidt’s and projects like Buzz are indicative of a kind of culture that both nurtures and encourages daring exploits like the ones in Baluja’s book, with each swashbuckling employee acting out mischievous impulses, large and small, every day. Google offers its employees an unconstrained world that is rich in resources in order to maximize creativity, and research on the creative process that I have been conducting since the 1980s shows that Google is doing things exactly right in this regard. But that kind of culture also magnifies just about every human tendency you can think of, including voyeurism, grandiosity, and greed.

How many David Barksdales and Marius Milners—individuals with the power to alter the course of a life or an industry in seconds—are, at this very moment, toying with Google’s massive, unregulated databases in ways we cannot even imagine? How many of them are getting ideas?

Computers are programmed and controlled by people, and nothing will ever change that simple fact. As soon as a Google computer “scans” an email—an obfuscating word for “reads”—any Google employee with sufficient password authority or technical savvy can too. When Google’s computers track and monitor people’s internet activities, so can its employees.

How much private information does Google have about you? They know, but they won’t say.

How is that information being used by the brash young techies the company takes such pride in hiring? Most likely, exactly as they please.

And how might their use of that information affect our lives in the future? No one knows—not even Google’s top executives—but Murphy’s law probably applies.

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Robert Epstein is Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research Technology in Vista, CA, and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine. A Ph.D. of Harvard University, he has published fifteen books and more than 250 articles on artificial intelligence, creativity, and other topics.

Why Google Plus Will Not Die (But May Change)

Column: Social Media Marketing Column

Why Google Plus Will Not Die (But May Change)

May 2, 2014 at 10:10am ET by Mark Traphagen

• inShare13

Last week’s announcement that Google+ founding father Vic Gundotra has left Google opened the door to a rash of speculation about the future of Google’s biggest venture into social media.

The idea that Google+ might be dying started with a TechCrunch post that included statements from a few anonymous sources declaring Google+ to be “walking dead” at Google:

We’ve heard [...] that Google+ is not “officially” dead, more like walking dead: “When you fire the top dog and take away all resources, it is what it is.”

In other words, supposedly Google had decided that Google+ was a failed experiment that needed to be put on “life support only/do not resuscitate” status. That post was cited by many others in the tech press as proof that Google+ is scheduled for a date with the Google morgue.

It is my opinion that such conclusions are not only premature and unwarranted, but actually make no sense. That is, they make no sense to anyone who really understands what Google+ is within the Googlesphere. However, that doesn’t mean that Google+ won’t be in for some serious changes in the coming months.

In this post, I will make four assertions about the future of Google+. I don’t mean any of these assertions to be absolutes, or even “predictions.” Like all of us on the outside of the few offices clustered around Larry Page’s in Mountain View, I see through a glass dimly. But I base these on my long experience of observing both Google and Google+.

Here’s what I will assert, followed by a more in-depth reason for each assertion:

1. Google+ the social network and user data infrastructure of Google is not going away.
2. However, Google+ the brand may change significantly (or even disappear).
3. That change may be driven by the realization that the future for big online advertising companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google is not so much in social engagement on one mega-network as it is in user data acquisition.
4. The Google+ project has been an incredible success (even if the social network never achieved the success of Facebook) because it drove the unification of Google products, the creation of a unified user privacy policy and sign in, and supercharged the data acquisition needs of Google.

Assertion 1: Google+ Is Not Going Away

If I would hang my hat and put down money on anything in this post, it’s that Google has no intentions whatsoever of killing Google+. For one thing, we have strong statements from Google+ Chief Architect Yonatan Zunger that the TechCrunch article alleging the coming death of G+ was “utter bollocks” and that the supposed reassignment of G+ staff to other projects was nothing more than a logistical moving of staff to a larger building for space reasons.

In his own statement about Gundotra’s departure, Google CEO Larry Page concluded that the company would “continue working hard to build great new experiences for the ever increasing number of Google+ fans.” Other Google employees chimed in on Google+ threads to add their affirmations that Google+ wasn’t going anywhere.

It’s nice to have those statements from top people at Google, but (understandably) you might be hesitant to take their word for it. I don’t think you have to. There are more fundamental reasons why I think Google is far from done with Google+.

It just doesn’t make sense that Google would now dismantle Google+. Google+ isn’t an added-on product with an off switch you can flip in a moment. It is now truly baked in to the very infrastructure of almost all of Google’s online products and services.

Some have noted that Google has in the past killed products without sentimentality. That is true, but turning off something like Google Reader was like removing a sock. Dismantling Google+ would be more like ripping out a person’s central nervous system.

Furthermore, because of that intensive integration into nearly all of Google, Google+ performs a number of valuable functions for Google, even apart from the social network that is its most visible component. (Much more about that in my third assertion.)

So, I don’t think Google+ is going anywhere, But….

Assertion 2: The Google+ Name May Be Deemphasized

I do think it quite plausible that we will, in the not-distant future, see a growing de-emphasis of the Google+ brand. Indeed, a possible hint of that came out just this week when The Verge noticed that Google is testing a version of their Sign In button for websites that says just “Sign in with Google” instead of “Sign in with Google+.”

Whether by bad luck or mishandling, or some combination of the two, the Google+ brand has never gained positive traction in public perception. Almost three years in, those of us who are advocates of the platform find ourselves still almost daily having to defend it from ridicule. That’s not a good position for any brand name.

However unfairly, the Google+ name has become almost indelibly linked by non-users with “fail,” “ghost town” and something that Google pushes unwanted on users of its other products. After three years, it may be time to admit that the opportunity to overcome that perception has been missed.

It may be that the social network continues to be known as Google+, but we stop hearing “Google+ is Google” type statements from Google. Perhaps, as Danny Sullivan speculated, user accounts may return to being just Google accounts. We might see the cessation of Google nagging (or in some cases, forcing) everyone to “sign up for Google+” in order to use other Google products.

The fact remains though, that Google could do all of that without killing the Google+ social network, and certainly without killing the other functions Google+ performs, which would be foolish.

So, conclusion to Assertion 2: Google+ is not going away, but the Google+ brand and how it is used by Google may change significantly.

Assertion 3: The Future Is NOT In Mega Social Network Platforms

Much of what I’m going to say here is building on an article by Mike Elgan titled “Why the Social Networks Are Falling Apart,” which you should read if you want to understand where all this is going now.

Mike’s article is quite cleverly titled. By “falling apart” he doesn’t at all mean that the major social networks are dying. Rather he’s commenting on their increasing move toward spinning off into developed or acquired apps that allow users to engage with one popular aspect of a network without having to get into all the other baggage that comes with the network as a whole.

An example of this would be the acquisitions of Instagram by Facebook and Vine by Twitter. Many pundits have been surprised that these apps haven’t yet been absorbed into their owner’s social networks.

But Elgan isn’t surprised at all. He says keeping these apps independent is a recognition by the Big Guys in social networking that an increasing number of users are shifting in two directions that actually complement each other: mobile and hyper-specific. (Note foursquare’s announcement yesterday that it’s splitting its functionality into two apps — including the newly-developed Swarm.)

Facebook was first to see this. Over the past two years, their users have shifted overwhelmingly to mobile. That created a real crisis for Facebook. Facebook has been entirely revenue-dependent on advertising inside their own platform, and mobile is notoriously advertising-averse.

At the same time, Facebook’s revenue model is perhaps even more threatened by another trend: the increasing move of users toward smaller, hyper-niche networks. Many users, and especially the younger set who are the future, seem to be increasingly wary of the “wide open” nature of big social networks. They just want to chat with their close friends, but the big networks tend to make conversations too open, pulling in all sorts of people they don’t necessarily want to interact with.

The first response of these networks was to offer audience segmentation options, such as Circles in Google+ or Friends Lists on Facebook.

The problem with such segmentation options, though, is that very few users ever use them. It’s just too much work to create all those circles or lists.

Furthermore, doing that doesn’t actually match up with the way we engage with people in the real world. Joe may be a co-worker, but he also may be a close friend. However, he may not be someone I want to talk politics with. In the terms of Facebook relationships statuses, “it’s complicated.”

So users are turning to micro-network apps such as Instagram, SnapChat, and WhatsApp for two reasons: they are entirely mobile, which is where more and more users spend most of their online time; and, they can easily be set up to engage one tight circle of friends.

Just this week at the F8 event, Facebook made several announcements moving in the many-apps and hyper-niche direction.

But how does acquiring or building these micro-network apps help the bottom lines of the mega social networks?

Elgan gives the answer in his article. It’s a realization that the real value of social networks to big companies like Facebook or Google isn’t in user engagement (not discounting that that is valuable), but in data acquisition.

To put it bluntly, those micro-networks become rich sources of user data acquisition that can be used to better target advertising in places other than the social network itself.

(In keeping with that, at the F8 event, Facebook also announced FAN, a mobile ad network that extends outside the Facebook platform.)

That leads me to my fourth and final assertion.

Assertion 4: Even If Google+ The Brand Has Failed, Google+ The Platform Has Been An Amazing Success

I don’t doubt that Google really wanted Google+ to succeed as a true social network. I certainly think that was Vic Gundotra’s dream. As much as some like to say, “Don’t look at G+ as a Facebook killer,” do we really doubt for a moment that Google wouldn’t have loved if it were?

Look at the first year ad campaigns for Google+ (see an example below). They basically came across as, “Hey, look, you can do everything on G+ that you do on Facebook, but with better privacy (Circles)!” Obviously, that wasn’t a big enough disruption for most people to make the shift.

Even if they believed that Google+ was better designed and really did make privacy more up front than Facebook, the Facebook momentum was too much to overcome. Many of us G+ evangelists made fun of the “but my friends aren’t on G+” mentality, but it honestly carried tremendous weight.

So why am I asserting that Google+ the project has been a resounding success? Because even if it never becomes a household-word social network, Google+ instigated a radical restructuring of Google that makes Google much better positioned for the future, in light of what we discussed above.

One Google To Rule Them All

Whenever I discuss the importance of Google+ to Google, I always come back to January 2012. That was when Google used Google+ as the “excuse” to unify its privacy policy. Until then, there was a separate privacy policy for each different Google product. Users wanting to use those products while logged in agreed to terms specific to that product only.

But in January 2012, Google made all users “re up” their privacy agreements. Now, users would agree to one overarching agreement, based on their Google+ profile, that would cover and unify all Google services.

For the user, that provided increased convenience. She could now sign in to Google once and then seamlessly use all Google services. Not only did she not have to log in and out again, but also her profile carried over into all services, making them more useful.

From Google’s side, the advantages were enormous. Within Google itself, users were incentivized to remain logged in, thus allowing Google to better collect and collate user data and behavior between services.

But that’s not all. The convenience of using Google logged in, combined with increasing opportunities to use websites and apps through a Google login, meant that more and more people were on the web logged in to Google all the time. And that made it much easier for Google to collect even more user data.

The unified privacy agreement also paved the way for “Search Plus Your World” personalized search. With more user data, and more people staying signed in to Google all day long, search could become much more personalized. In theory, this leads to better search results for the individual. That means a happier user who will use Google more, and thus be more exposed to Google ads.

But what else does Google do with all that data? The primary revenue-centered use is for targeting advertising. The more Google knows about your personal information, your preferences, your online behaviors, your location, etc., the more accurately they can serve up ads targeted to you, specifically.

And that’s where Google has a distinct advantage over Facebook and Twitter: the Google Ad Network. Not only can Google show hyper-targeted ads in Google properties like Search and YouTube, but Google also owns and runs the largest online advertising network in the world, with millions of sites displaying Google AdSense ads. As noted above, Facebook is beginning to build its own ad network, but it is starting from way behind.

So, Google+ became the catalyst not only to finally unify Google, but also to get a much larger amount of user accounts, while incentivizing users to log in to those accounts, thus providing user data that generates more ad revenue for Google.

From Social Network To User Data Service

For the past week, I’ve been face palming over my lack of foresight to understand a major clue about the future I’m proposing here — a clue that was staring me in the face for at least the past six months.

Here it is. Up until some time last year, when you would hear an official Google+ spokesperson speaking at a conference, he or she would speak about the advantages of Google+ the social platform for brands. You’d hear about how well you can engage your audience, and the glories of Hangouts for brand building and customer retention, etc. That all changed about six months ago.

More recently, all Google+ spokespeople seem to speak off the same talking points sheet, and it’s all about Google+ Sign In for webmasters and developers.

At the time, I railed about that. I thought “once again, Google marketing missing the point.” I was frustrated that they were failing to teach businesses what I had been teaching for two years: the incredible reach a brand could get by being active on the G+ social platform, particularly due to its influence into Search.

What I missed was that the shift in the conference talks was probably signaling the change in emphasis I’m talking about today. That is, Google was already strategically moving from pushing Google+ the social engagement platform to promoting Google+ the one-stop data miner for webmasters and app developers in relation to their users.

When webmasters/developers incorporate G+ Sign In, it’s a win-win for both them and Google. Both get access to — and the ability to manipulate — much deeper levels of user data and behavior. As I indicated above, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the coming months we see the G+ branding dropped from things like Sign In, as they may already be testing. But they could do that without dismantling anything they’ve already built with Google+.

Conclusion: Whither Goest Google+?

I’ve argued here that not only is Google itself maintaining they have no plans to dismantle or kill Google+, to do so makes no sense for them. However, a change or de-emphasis of the Google+ brand could benefit Google while doing no harm to the overall Google brand.

In this scenario, Google gets to have their cake and eat it too. They don’t lose face by killing a project that once was so big it is rumored that all Google employee bonuses hinged on it. At the same time, they continue to reap that project’s benefits while losing the weight its brand has become around their necks.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land.

Related Entries

• Official: David Besbris Will Be New Head Of Google+, Takes Over For Departing Vic Gundotra
• What Would Happen If Google Really Did Kill Google+?
• Does A New Non-Google+ Sign In Button Confirm The Demise Of Google Plus?

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media Marketing | Google | Google: Critics | Google: Google+| Social Media Marketing Column