Should the phone companies be able to permanently cut off your service if you say something they don’t like?
Early yesterday morning I received a worried note from one of our regular columnists saying our website no longer came up in any Google search results.
Google and Facebook are the top gatekeepers to the global Internet, and in early May they had both purged us, with Facebook blocking our content and Google de-ranking all of our pages.
Google search results had previously placed many of our pieces very high, but now they no longer appeared at all unless one included “unz” in the search string. Thus, only those actually looking for us would ever find our content.
But this latest blow was even more severe, and now neither searches with nor without “unz” ever seemed to return any of our pages. Google had apparently “disappeared” us from the entire Internet.
Despite the earlier Facebook and Google bans, our traffic had easily broken all records in June, with our uniquely alternative perspectives overcoming the setback inflicted by the Internet giants. So apparently the Monopolist of Mountain View had decided to turns its screws a little tighter.
As it happens, I was somewhat mistaken. Later that day, I discovered a similar fate had befallen a very wide range of popular conservative and Republican-leaning websites, including those offering very mainstream and moderate perspectives:
www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techwatch/corinne-weaver/2020/07/21/updated-google-blacklists-newsbusters-conservative-sites
www.thefederalist.com/2020/07/21/google-appears-to-test-its-ability-to-blacklist-conservative-media-ahead-of-election/
FoxNews host Tucker Carlson currently has the highest rated show in cable history, but Google had decided that his websites no longer exist:
www.tuckercarlson.com/
www.foxnews.com/shows/tucker-carlson-tonight
So apparently our “controversial” content had had little connection with our total disappearance from the Internet. Instead, a Google censor had decided we were some sort of conservative website, to be purged along with all the others.
I felt a little like the secret leader of the biggest Trotskyite network in the 1930s USSR, suddenly arrested in the middle of the night in an NKVD raid and thrown into a dank interrogation cell, where I desperately wondered “Who had betrayed me?!” But then I eventually discovered that 50,000 other people had been rounded up that same night, mostly for complaining that the bread they recently bought had been stale…and I remembered complaining about stale bread to someone the previous week…
As it happens, Google’s sudden total removal of all those websites including our own turned out to be temporary, and the search results were soon returned to what they had been the day before, with our pages still merely de-ranked and almost impossible to find rather than entirely eliminated. But the incident highlighted the absurd political and media power now allowed to a private company and its top executives.
Google’s share of the search engine market is nearly 90%, both in the US and worldwide, and Facebook has almost an equally strong monopoly in social networking. They are the gatekeepers to the Internet, and does it really make sense to allow them to have the power to “disappear” whatever websites or political candidates they don’t like? Should the phone companies be able to permanently cut off your service if you say something they don’t like?
During the Golden Age of television, if one network had controlled 90% of the American audience, it surely would have been treated as a regulated monopoly, and required to behave in an even-handed and fair manner. Shouldn’t Google and Facebook be held to the same standard?
Patterns may or may not be indicate of ultimate causes, but our alternative media website had spent five years providing material of an extremely controversial nature without encountering any difficulties with Internet gatekeepers, while our traffic steadily rose. Then, in late April I published an extremely popular article presenting the strong evidence that our disastrous Covid-19 outbreak was probably the unintentional blowback from an exceptionally reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and within days we had been purged by both Facebook and Google. So it seems possible that the juxtaposition of these two occurrences may be more than purely coincidental.
Although our traffic has subsequently reached new heights, the Google ban was especially vexing to me, for reasons that I have noted:
For the last ten years, my article The Myth of Hispanic Crime had regularly ranked #2 among the 180 million search results Google returned for “Latino Crime” and the 60 million for “Hispanic Crime,” an achievement for which I had become inordinately proud. But although comparable search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo still rank my piece near the very top, Google has completely “disappeared” it.
I think a reasonable measure of a topic’s importance is the total number of search results it returns. Communism and Communists dominated the entire twentieth century and the political party of that name still holds sway in gigantic China. So a search on “Communism” returns 163 million results, a vast number but still somewhat below the total for “Latino Crime.” Imagine how an academic or journalist might feel if his article analyzing Communism had spent a full decade ranked #2 across the entire Internet, but Google had then suddenly decided to blacklist it for reasons entirely unrelated to its intrinsic or objective quality.
Still, these unfortunate developments are hardly comparable to those experienced under some other regimes of the twentieth century. I’ve finally gotten around to reading the The Black Book of Communism, that authoritative 1997 account of the USSR and the numerous other regimes which adopted a similar ideology, and although I’m only half way through the 800 pages, the mass-executions and wholesale imprisonments that found throughout make for rather depressing material.
Moreover, there are disturbing indications that our own tottering society is now heading in some extremely negative direction, a scenario in which de-rankings by Google would constitute only the most minor of petty grievances. Former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi has always been an extremely level-headed individual, but yesterday he published an extremely popular column evocatively entitled “A Nation Falling Apart,” which included the statement “There are a lot of indications that the American stratocruiser is about to crash.”
A few days ago, I had made some of these same points when I was interviewed at length by Luis Razo Bravo of the European Institute of Science in Management, who had studied during the 1980s under Richard Herrnstein of Harvard and whose other recent guests had included Charles Murray and the eminent theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss.
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A DANGEROUS CONUNDRUM – WHEN UNJUST POWER AND CORRUPT MONEY COMBINE!
The solution to this conundrum appears to be: Break-up those “social media monopolies” like Facebook and Google, into smaller functionally independent subsidiaries offering a more open public platform for a diversity of perspectives and views, by applying execution of Sherman Antitrust Acts legal action, as in the cases of Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, etc… Otherwise, the only alternative left would be government regulation of private social media companies or corporations, an option that would endanger the domestic and international freedom of the press in general. How do we prevent private social media corporations from practicing censorship of views they don’t like? It is not accidental that both Facebook and Google are directly connected to DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL SURVEILLANCE PROTOCOLS orchestrated by the CIA/NSA/Department of Homeland Security/Directorate of National Intelligence, etc…, and, who knows who else, in the guise and pretense of “the fight against terrorism.” Since the so-called “P.A.T.R.I.O.T ACT that unconstitutionally granted extended surveillance powers to the FBI/NSA and other so-called “intelligence agencies” or “law enforcement agencies,” jurisdictions are blurred and activities are redundant in their operational scope, so that there is so much centralization among these interlocking jurisdictions, that the “surveillance State apparatus” is morphing more and more into a slippery slope towards “democratic fascism” — “Free in word but slave in practice.” How? These agencies are seldom, if not, never, monitored by any independent congressional or citizen-based or community-based “organs of public oversight.” And once those inordinate powers are granted, they’re seldom rescinded, but rather, continue to increase and intensify, in both mission statement and functional operations, e.g., FBI now has “international reach” whereas before, it was merely a domestic internal investigatory agency; likewise, the Coast Guard that traditionally protected our shores within the 12-mile international oceanic limits, can be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, or to any other “trouble spot” on the globe, to fight a war of aggression, such as, unlike the Korean War, during a “UN-unapproved” military invasion of a certain country,e.g., Venezuela. In short, the incestuous marriage between the military, Pentagon, and intelligence agencies on the one hand, and the unconstitutional concubinage between that federal government complex and the private social media corporations have compounded the problem of maintaining and keeping the free press, truly free! Nowadays, corporate media monopolies like NBC, CNN, or FOX get their cues from the Pentagon, due to their corrupt entanglement with the Military-Industrial-Complex, Stock Market gambling, and Wall Street operators, for whom “perpetual war,” is a bloody business.” For example, Haliburton Corporation is profitably engaged in “servicing our troops!” For almost 20 years! Not forgetting that Julian Assange, a true martyr of the real free press, is in jail in Britain, waiting for possible extradition to the United States, for merely publishing video-taped war crimes perpetrated by the so-called “Coalition Forces” in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, of course, this is not new: Which newspaper had called the Spanish-American War of 1898, “A SPLENDID LITTLE WAR!” The corporate media in the United States is totally silent regarding the torturous plight and psychological abuse being inflicted upon Mr. Assage! So, How “free” is the “free press?” God help us all! *