Here's an egregious example of a big tech censorship.
The Global COVID Summit is an international COVID advocacy organization for doctors and medical scientists. The doctors and scientists leading the organization are all posted publicly on the website in a format that can be easily verified. This is a bona fide organization of real doctors and scientists.
The organization recently published a declaration signed by the membership with three basic resolutions:
1) There should be no forced Coronavirus vaccination of healthy children. In particular, healthy children who have the acquired natural immunity that comes from having had COVID should not be required to be vaccinated.
2) Those who have survived infection with coronavirus have a naturally-acquired immunity that is as good or better than the immunity provided by existing vaccines. Governments need to recognize this naturally-acquired immunity as being equivalent to vaccination in any vaccine-mandate programs.
3) Doctors need the autonomy to treat COVID patients as they see fit. Governments should not interfere in the doctor-patient relationship.
These are now seen as ‘radical’ positions. Which on it's own, tells you a lot about how the mainstream narrative has been controlled and directed by governments over the past 18 months.
Take a look at the three above resolutions, and imagine you were reading them in 2019, and they referred to coronavirus flu. None of those resolutions would have even raised an eyebrow two years ago. They would have been considered so obvious they should hardly need saying. That's how much the public discussion of ideas has been massaged and managed over the past two years.
Why is this important? I think it is important information when an organization of doctors and scientists makes recommendations that strongly challenge existing government policy. I think people have a right to know about this organization and its declaration.
There's a problem with that though. Much of North America's mainstream media have worked very hard to ignore the Global COVID Summit and its recommendations. And now, Google, the world's largest search engine, is also doing it's best to make the organization invisible.
Most search engines have no trouble finding the Global COVID Summit.
Here's what Bing.com shows for "Global COVID Summit"
Yahoo and DuckDuckGo both show the same top search finding.
Now look what Google comes up for "Global COVID Summit":
Not only is the Global COVID Summit not the top finding, it doesn't show up at all in the first ten pages of search results. Google has effectively banished the organization.
Google's willingness to censor does have some limits. If you search with the organization's web address "globalcovidsummit.org", yes, Google will grudgingly place the organization as its first finding. But then again, if you already have an organization's web address, you don't need a search engine to find it.
I tried to come up with an innocent explanation for why Google couldn't find the Global COVID Summit when other search engines could. Google's Search engines look first in the html source code in the document header to determine rankings for their search findings. If the organization's name wasn't in the title section of the html header, perhaps Google might not rate it properly. But the Global COVID Summit did put its name in the title field in their webpage header. Here's the requisite part of the html source code for that site: "<!DOCTYPE html><html id="phx-wrapper" lang="en-us"><head><title>Global Covid Summit</title>"
So I'm afraid we can't excuse Google on those grounds.
Someone knowledgeable about this issue has suggested to me that the Google search algorithms may include looking for websites that have ads that Google is paid to promote. There are no ads on the Global COVID Summit site, so if Google uses such algorithms, the Global COVID Summit would naturally be pushed way down their list of search findings. Perhaps Google is not trying to censor what we can see for political reasons. Maybe they are only deciding what we can see based on what makes the most money for Google. Perhaps what we are seeing is not censorship per se, just capitalism at its finest!
The mainstream media in North America work very hard to exclude data that doesn't fit their COVID narratives. Foxnews promotes a quite different COVID narrative than CNN does, but both have a whole series of no-go areas in terms of COVID stories. My once-beloved Canadian Broadcasting Corporation may as well be CNN North for all the diversity of opinion they allow on COVID issues or American politics. (I suppose that's part of why so many good journalists have fled to Substack over the past 18 months: Substack doesn't prevent them from doing journalism.)
The internet has become the last bastion of free speech. When something is all over the internet, it gets harder and harder for mainstream media to ignore it. Now Google has come to the rescue, becoming a de facto censor for what people are allowed to find on the internet. I find this deeply disturbing.
I don't like it that Google is now deciding what I should or should not be allowed to see. They are no longer my default search engine for that very reason. If you want to know what's actually on the internet, as opposed to what Google will allow you to find, you may want to consider doing the same.
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