That’s the headline and a little known truth. And it should be shouted from the mountaintops and to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, by our representatives, when he testifies before Congress September 5. That Google is no search engine should also be emphasized now with the revelation that 96 percent of its “Trump” news comes from liberal media outlets.
Why should we care about this? Because, says an expert, Google and Facebook (and Twitter, I’ll add), have the power to shift “upwards of 12 million votes” in November’s midterm elections.
Why Google is not a true search engine was well illustrated by an experience I had last year, which I wrote about in “How Google Censors The New American (and Other Conservatives).” As I explained May 14, 2017:
While writing an article Friday, I wanted to link up to previous articles I’d written that provided background information. Believe it or not, though, since I’ve penned literally thousands of pieces over the years, the easiest way for me to find a given article is the same way you would: via a search engine.
I was looking for pieces I’d written, at The New American, about schoolchildren punished for innocent play such as pointing their fingers like a gun and saying “Bang!” So I went to Google and entered as search terms and phrases, “‘Selwyn Duke’ pointed fingers like gun and said bang ‘the new American.’”
…I clicked the search button.
Nothing.
Nothing relevant from The New American (TNA), anyway, on any page I checked. I knew Google was playing games, as I’d had similar experiences before. So I scrolled to the bottom of the page where Google states:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
I clicked the link and, lo and behold, one of my TNA articles was at the very top of the first page.
Now, question: When searching for “Selwyn Duke” and “the new american,” how are pages containing “Selwyn Duke” and “The New American” not among the “most relevant results”?
Answer: When they’re not relevant to Google’s agenda.
The kicker is that when I put the same terms/phrases into search engine DuckDuckGo.com — whose database is far smaller than Google’s — bingo, five relevant results immediately appeared.
Note that a reader contacted me earlier this month saying he had an identical experience searching for one of my articles. He stated that he put the same search terms into both Google and DuckDuckGo, and reports that he checked 10 pages on the former and found nothing. And on DuckDuckGo?
My piece — the exact one he was looking for — was the first result.
As the reader wrote, “Google pretty much put your article in the Memory Hole.”
And this now happens to virtually all conservatives all the time. Example: When PJ Media’s Paula Bolyard examined the first 100 Google results for “Trump” news, the “blatant” censorship was even worse than she expected.
“The only right-leaning sites to appear in the top 100 were The Wall Street Journal and Fox News with 3 and 2 results respectively,” she reports.
“PJ Media did not appear in the first 100 results, nor did National Review, The Weekly Standard, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Daily Wire, Hot Air, Townhall, Red State, or any other conservative-leaning sites except the two listed above,” Bolyard continued.
This is why Google is not (any longer) a true search engine: A search engine searches for what you’re seeking, providing the most relevant results based on your search criteria. Google doesn’t do this. It behaves a bit like a news aggregator, Whatfinger or Drudge, for example, deciding what news and other results are worthy of exposure. It literally will sometimes hide results most relevant to your search criteria.
And “hiding” is not an overstatement. Note that the first page of Google search results gets 92 percent of all traffic. Burying an item on even the third or fourth page amounts to banishment to Web Siberia. The exposure would almost be the same if Google didn’t list the page at all.
By the way, Google essentially admitted in 2015 that it was leaving the search-engine business. That is, it announced it was considering ranking websites not based on just popularity (which, for all its faults, is democratic), but on “truthfulness” — as determined by desert-mystic Google techies, of course.
The same phenomenon is now apparent with establishment social media, which now is less social and more media. This reality is why Twitter’s Dorsey will be testifying before the “House Energy and Commerce Committee on September 5 regarding his company’s censorship practices,” as Breitbart reports.
At issue is the company’s “shadowbanning.” Here’s how this deceitful practice works: You send out a tweet to your “followers” (people interested in hearing your voice), but Twitter secretly blocks it. You then get no responses from your followers and likely assume they weren’t interested in the topic, not knowing they never saw your tweet in the first place.
Facebook also engages in censorship, which brings us to why these companies no longer are true social media.
The idea behind social media was that it would be revolutionary: The people — the users and only the users — would determine popularity, what would be seen. It was democracy applied to media. But now Facebook, Twitter, and others are behaving like regular publishers, determining what will be seen based on their editorial criteria. Yet there is one difference:
At least the New York Times is honest about that being its model.
The result of this deceit is that “conservatives are too often finding their voices silenced,” as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who’d called on Dorsey to testify, wrote in a statement.
So how effective is this censorship? After conducting a study, psychologist Robert Epstein told Fox News host Tucker Carlson Friday that Internet tech giants have the capacity to shift “upwards of 12 million votes” in the November 6 elections.
“We should be extremely concerned,” said Epstein, who emphasizes that he’s “not a conservative.” “Content no longer matters. All that matters is the filtering and ordering of content.” (video below)
Of course, GoogTwitFace’s justification for this behavior is that they’re combating “fake news” — they have a social conscience, you see. And it’s on full display in China, where some American tech companies are facilitating Beijing’s tyrannizing of its own people, as the regime endeavors to make 1984’s Big Brother a reality (video below). Yes, preach us a sermon, GoogTwitFace.
As for big tech’s building of Big Brother here, Epstein is sounding the alarm. While he does think a remedy may lie down the road, he also told Carlson that at “the moment, I think democracy is in trouble.”
For sure. You can’t compete in the arena of ideas if you’re excluded from that arena. And however bad you think GoogTwitFace’s censorship of conservatives is, remember this: It’s worse.
