A convergence of EVIL: Google, Amazon and Facebook use technology to enslave humanity, suppress knowledge and accelerate human suffering

With Amazon.com now purchasing Whole Foods, giving it a near-monopoly over multiple sectors of the U.S. economy, we are entering the age of corporate giants dominating and enslaving humankind. Apple has more debt-free cash than nearly all world governments, including the United States of America (which is drowning in debt). Google has a near-monopoly over all search results, a position of power it exploits to silence dissenting views and disconnect humanity from important knowledge. And Facebook suppresses all truthful information that challenges the false narratives of the globalists. Corporations like these abuse their power to enslave humanity rather than setting us free.

At the dawn of the invention of television, the technology was hailed as a way to bring uplifting education to every corner of the globe. It didn’t take long, however, before broadcast television was turned into a means to control the masses through the dissemination of fake news — which has been going on forever — and the programming of consumers to purchase branded products often made with toxic ingredients. The dream of turning TV technology into a mechanism to set humanity free was quickly crushed, and today it is widely known that the more hours people spend watching TV, the more unintelligent and unaware they are. (Do you know any intelligent, self-aware, healthy person who indulges in watching fake TV?)

Similarly, the internet was once hailed as a means to set humanity free. But that dream, too, has been crushed under the extreme censorship and obfuscation of internet-intensive businesses like Google, Amazon and Facebook. Here are just a few examples:

• Google censors nearly all REAL news publishers from Google News, making sure that only FAKE (mainstream) media achieves visibility so that fake media narratives dominate public attention. Those fake narratives include everything from the collapse of WTC 7 from “office fires” to the pharmaceutical industry’s ridiculously false claim that vaccines have never harmed any child in the history of the world. For all the same reasons, Google also algorithmically suppresses websites it doesn’t like, including independent news publishers covering investigative stories on vaccines, GMOs and the climate change science hoax. Far from setting humanity free to find what they want on the internet, Google covertly limits search results to primarily those content sites that agree with globalist narratives, all of which are anti-human and anti-progress. Google is also pro-Big Pharma and bans the advertising of natural supplement products that help people prevent disease and reduce suffering.
• Facebook follows a similar algorithmic censorship track, penalizing websites that dare talk about children being harmed by vaccines, science corruption in the genetic engineering industry, the dangers of pesticides or the scientifically validated benefits of carbon dioxide to planet Earth. Facebook manually assigns penalty scores to entire websites, crushing their reach and making sure their content can’t even reach fans who have deliberately “liked” the site and want to receive its information. Mark Zuckerberg, the grandson of a Rockefeller, is being groomed for a position of globalist domination and says he might run for president. He’s already obediently spouting every official lie that Hillary Clinton repeated on the campaign trail in 2016.
• Amazon.com, founded by evil globalist Jeff Bezos, uses its marketplace dominance to promote the interests of the pharmaceutical industry while suppressing natural medicine. Did you know that Amazon is getting into the prescription drug business in the hopes of putting local pharmacies out of business? The company also bans FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) activities with many nutritional supplements and botanical extracts that can prevent serious diseases such as cancer. Now that Amazon is purchasing Whole Foods, Jeff Bezos is likely going to use the same pro-pharma stance to try to transform Whole Foods stores into prescription drug pharmacy locations while eliminating most of Whole Foods’ staff by replacing them with robots.
• Amazon has already pioneered robot-staffed retail stores and has also developed a way to eliminate human cashiers by using RFID tracking of all customers and the items they pick off the shelves. Whole Foods workers are already freaking out, realizing they’re going to be replaced by robots and drones. In effect, Jeff Bezos will promote mass unemployment, mass drug addiction, the censorship of natural products and centralized control over retailing. All of this makes Jeff Bezos richer and more powerful, but it also destroys human dignity, human health and human knowledge. (For people like Jeff Bezos, selling opioids is a great business model because people keep buying them over and over again… the impact on society be damned!)

Evil corporations, evil globalists and evil agendas

What do all these evil corporations and globalist leaders have in common? They are all enemies of humanity:

• They all promote toxic vaccines that are right now killing over 1,400 children a year in the U.S. alone, injuring another 100,000 plus annually.
• They all promote Big Pharma’s toxic medications that earn high profits.
• They all suppress natural medicine, medicinal herbs and cannabinoids (CBD).
• They all supported Hillary Clinton and promote Democrats, the DNC and big government. They all hated Trump just like they hate America, the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment.
• They all promote Monsanto, GMOs, glyphosate and pesticide chemicals as being “good for humanity.” They all claim to be “pro environment” even while supporting the corporations that poison our world with toxic chemicals that kill life and devastate ecosystems.
• They all believe in censorship and suppression as a way to shore up their power and silence dissent.
• They all put profits first and humanity last. To them, human beings are just “useless idiots” to be manipulated or exploited for profit. If Jeff Bezos could fire every single Whole Foods worker right now and replace them all with robots, he would absolutely do so.
• They all believe the ends justify the means, which is why Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post feels justified in completely fabricating “anonymous sources” to publish fake news in an attempt to overthrow the American Republic.
• They all despise diversity of thought and demand absolute conformity and obedience to left-wing narratives covering everything from LGBT issues to the elimination of gun rights. Diversity of opinion is not allowed. Conformity is mandatory.

In effect, these corporations are pure evil. They are run by evil globalists and they ally themselves with other evil corporations that poison our planet, enslave humanity and seek to deprive us all of basic human liberty and dignity.

You’re not helpless: Here’s what you can do to protect your power, your liberty and your future

All these evil corporations depend on one thing to remain in business: Compliant consumers.

If people stop financially supporting these evil corporations, they will cease to exist. The only reason they continue to grow right now is because people continue to feed them economic resources.

Until now, many people had not been fully aware of just how evil these corporations truly are. They had no idea they were about to be enslaved and overrun by Google, Amazon, Facebook and other similar corporate entities. Suddenly, however, it’s becoming obvious to even those who previously decried such warnings as “conspiracy theories.” Suddenly even Whole Foods workers are waking up, flipping out and realizing they are all about to be made obsolete by the Jeff Bezos robot apocalypse. From Reuters:

“I’ve heard that Amazon’s culture is really cutthroat. That worries me,” one bagger at a Providence, Rhode Island, store said.

At least one customer was concerned that an Amazon purchase would further distance Whole Foods from its roots as a purveyor of premium, organic and specialty foods.

…”I think that they are a very profit-driven company, so there might be some streamlining as far as labor,” said Sasha Hardin, 28, of the Mount Pleasant store, who has been with Whole Foods for 6-1/2 years.

Here are some action items you can take right now to stop feeding these corporate monsters that are destroying our collective future:

1. Stop using Google. Find alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo. For searching news and the independent media, use GoodGopher.com or read Censored.news each day, which aggregates headlines from the internet’s most censored indy news sites.
2. Stop using Facebook. Why would you divulge all the details of your private life to an NSA data collection front anyway? Facebook is nothing but a massive social network spy machine that ruins your life and makes you feel disconnected and depressed. Check out GAB.ai instead.
3. Stop shopping at Amazon.com and Whole Foods. Support local retailers and local grocers, or you’ll soon find them all out of business. If you don’t consciously decide to start shopping at other retailers, you’re going to wake up one day in a world totally dominated by Amazon, where natural health products are banned and prescription drugs are pushed for everything. For lab-verified natural health products, support the Health Ranger Store. For fresh produce, grow your own food or support your local grocers that provide organic and non-GMO options.
4. Make conscious choices about where you spend your money, knowing that every dollar you spend is a “vote” for that organization. Globalist organizations like Google, Amazon and Facebook are all about enslaving humanity and stripping you of knowledge, dignity and health. Vote for the kind of companies who share your belief in natural medicine, empowering individuals, decentralizing political power (returning power to local communities) and halting the mass poisoning of our world with pesticides and GMOs.

The power is in your hands.

P.S. On a personal note, I’m ready to pre-announce a massive expansion to the Health Ranger Store warehouse and fulfillment center in Texas which will be completed at the end of this year. I’m going to post a survey where you can tell us what sort of products you want us to carry and ship. Because we’ll have so much warehouse space available, we’re going to substantially expand our product offerings so that you have an ethical choice of where to buy those products. Watch for a story + survey to be posted soon on Natural News. Although we’ll never be able to compete with the sheer scale of Amazon — nor its free Prime shipping — we aim to bring you a real alternative to Amazon.com and Whole Foods for the non-perishable products you want the most.

Google wants to collect your poop, spit, and tears in voluntary health study aimed at knowing all your medical secrets

When you stop and take time to think about it, it’s incredible how much personal information is collected from us on a day-to-day basis. In the middle of most American cities, you would be hard-pressed to walk even one hundred feet without seeing a traffic camera watching your every move. Certain types of televisions and smartphones now have the ability to collect images we view, audio, and even personal text messages. (Related: Read about the different ways you can stop your phone from spying on you.) But now, Google seems to have taken things to the next level by seeking out intimate knowledge on medical conditions and your physical health. That’s right – it’s not enough to know about your interests and search habits; Google wants information on your body.

The Baseline Project is a multi-year study that will ask volunteers to submit an egregious amount of physical test results and medical information. The project, which is expected to cost more than $100 million, will look for information regarding the warning signs of heart disease and cancer by having volunteers wear a heart-tracking watch on their wrists. The watch will track the volunteer’s pulse and movements in real time. In addition, the project participants will undergo x-rays and heart scans, have their genomes deciphered and blood tested.

Even though Google will only monitor each volunteer for four years, the entire experiment may very well take a decade to complete, considering the fact that the project will examine a total of 10,000 participants.

Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, a physician researcher at Stanford University explained, “No one has done this kind of deep dive on so many individuals. This depth has never been attempted.” Gambhir added, “It’s to enable generations to come to mine it, to ask questions, without presupposing what the questions are.”

The Baseline Project was officially announced in 2014, but the study was so complicated that it took an additional two and a half years to organize.

“We need to continue to look for signals that may be actionable,” said Verily’s chief medical officer Jessica Mega. Verily is a branch of Google that focuses on health and the study of life sciences. “And we need to build out infrastructure to be able to do that,” Mega continued. “Those tools will be important for the health-care ecosystem. We are creating the infrastructure to deal with large health data sets.”

In addition to the monitoring of the participants’ heart rates and medical conditions, the study also requires volunteers to provide stool samples, saliva, and tears. As if this wasn’t enough, participants must sleep with an electrical loop underneath their mattress to record their sleep patterns. The data collected from this electrical loop would then be transmitted to a separate device inside of the participant’s home, which would then be sent to Google’s servers.

While Google seems to have the details of the study all planned out and ready to go, Eric Heckler, a professor at Arizona State University, has his doubts. “The question is why should people continue to give you data,” he says. “People wear a wrist tracker for a few months, but even the burden of charging one will make them stop. There is a lot of hounding involved.”

Professor Heckler raises a very important point. Considering how long each of the volunteers will be monitored, and considering how much work they will have to do on their own time in order to continue sending information to Google’s servers, the chances that the information will remain accurate are extremely slim.

Thus far, Google has not provided any information regarding how specifically the collected information will be used, nor have they explained how they plan on ensuring that the medical information remains safe.

Sources include:

TechnologyReview.com

Thousands damaged by shingles vaccine are trying to sue Merck

What was supposed to be a cure for shingles has brought on worse complications. Thousands have attempted to file lawsuits against American pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. for problems associated with their product Zostavax. In an interview with TROFire.com, Troy Bouk, Associate Attorney at the Levin Papantonio law firm, stated that the side effects of the shingles vaccine included meningitis, encephalitis, stroke, palsy, and many others. According to Bouk, these side effects are all features of shingles—and with the vaccine created from a live strain of the virus, it’s no wonder that Zostavax has caused people to experience these conditions.

Zostavax was approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Bouk said. The group has since recommended that only people 60 and above should take the vaccine. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on the other hand, approved Zostavax for people 50 and above, states TheFreeThoughtProject.com. The CDC has warned that people within the 50 to 59 age group may lose the alleged protection benefits of the vaccine by the time the reach 60, however.

“Let’s say you’re 55 years old. It may stay in your system till you’re 60, but you actually are at the greatest risk of getting shingles when you’re in your 60s. That’s why the CDC recommends that you really don’t get it until you’re in your 60s, because that’s probably when you’re going to need it the most,” Bouk said.

On the efficacy of the vaccine, the CDC has stated that it only reduced the risk of shingles by a mere 51 percent, making its true potency uncertain.

This unpredictability is the reason why attorney Marc J. Bern of Marc J. Bern & Partners LLP has “thousands of complaints” that have yet to be filed in Philadelphia, Penn. In a statement to FiercePharma.com, Bern has said that the injuries run “the gamut from contracting shingles as a result of the vaccine all the way to serious personal injuries such as blindness in one eye, individuals who have serious paralysis in their extremities, brain damage, all the way to death.”

In an additional comment, Bern stated that he thought “Merck has failed terribly … to warn about the very serious side effects and the failure of the vaccine to do what they claim it does.” (Related: Shingles vaccine made with pig gelatin, MSG and residual components of human DNA from an aborted fetus. Why?)

Bern has said that his firm has been examining the drug “for quite some time”, and that the litigation has “merits.” The attorney has also expressed his belief that the cases should be grouped together for mass tort status. Another attorney, Michael Katz, agrees with Bern.

In response, a spokesperson for Merck has stated that “Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of our medicines and vaccines.”

If that’s the case, then why are thousands of people experiencing ailments associated with the disease the vaccine is supposed to cure? Because it’s made from the same virus, that’s why. Is it wonder why Zostavax is causing more harm than good? News and other media concerning vaccines and drug companies can be read over at Vaccines.news and BigPharmaNews.com.

Zostavax facts

• Zostavax was approved by the FDA in 2006.
• In 2016, Zostavax pulled in $749 million in sales for Merck.
• Currently, Zostavax is the only approved shingles vaccine in the United States. GlaxoSmithKline is working on a second shingles vaccine called Shingrix. The drug manufacturer is still seeking the approval of the FDA for their drug.

Sources include:
TROFire.com
TheFreeThoughtProject.com
FiercePharma.com
ForThePeople.com

Climate change app terrorizes youth with wildly exaggerated sea level projections

Thanks to current technology, you too can experience the so-called “disastrous effects” of climate change wherever you may be. Development studios Strange Flavor and secondverse have collaborated with visual artist Justin Brice Guariglia to create an app, named After Ice, in honor of Earth Day. Utilizing geolocation, augmented reality (AR), and collected NASA predictions, the app will show you how your area will look when affected by global ice melt and rising sea levels. Bubbles and fish will also sometimes swim past, states the DailyMail.co.uk. Yet, taking “the science out of the lab” reveals this: rising sea and ice levels just aren’t happening. After Ice is simply more fear mongering disguised as a “fun” and “educational” app.

The fact is that the sea levels aren’t rising because of anything we’ve done. As reported by the folks over at ClimateChangeDispatch.com, a 2006 study by Curtis E. Larsen and Inga Clark has shown no connection between carbon dioxide concentrations and the purported sea level rise. Another study conducted in 2007 by S.J. Holgate has shown the phenomenon to be cyclical and naturally occurring; the researcher even discovered that the sea levels decreased during the period of the study. The rise and fall of sea levels is never constant and changes seasonally, even daily. Those oscillating levels are caused by a variety of factors too: equatorial trade winds, tectonic events, soil compaction, and storm surges can all affect the sea levels and any attempts to measure them accurately.

Glaciers aren’t exactly melting either. A 2015 article by the Express.co.uk has pointed out that satellite images have shown that Antarctic ice is growing, not shrinking. In fact, a logbook by polar explorers Report Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton was discovered last year and showed that the Antarctic hasn’t shrunk at all in the last 100 years. A similar story can be found on the other side of the world. Arctic sea ice hit a record growth last September and hasn’t decreased in the slightest. The truth is that neither the Antarctic nor the Arctic have shown any outward signs of lost or losing ice. Not even snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas have lost ice during the last decade, which means ice at low and high levels are more less still at the same amounts as before.

So much for rising sea levels and melting glaciers.

After Ice: What its developers say

“Experience climate change and the effects of global warming through augmented reality,” wrote the developers on their product description page. “After Ice simulates your location in various data-backed future scenarios of global ice melt and sea level rise. Additionally, it lets you see the NASA-projected* effect of sea level rise accurately within a 100 mile radius of New York City in the 2080s — within the lifetime of children alive today.”

Of the project, Guariglia has said: “I thought of this app as a way to help visualize what is happening to the planet, but is too slow for us to see. We have a serious disconnect from important existential issues like giant melting glaciers. Global warming is happening, however it needs to be emotionally felt before people will want to take action. I hope this app will at the very least get a conversation going and get some of the science out of the lab, and into people hands.

Read more on sea levels and climate by visiting ClimateScienceNews.com.

*Projections for NYC come from NASA/GISS & NPCC data and accurate within a 100 mile radius of New York City, and includes storm and tidal surge estimates in it’s visualization. Total melt projections come from the Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk
9to5mac.com
ClimateChangeDispatch.com
JSTOR.org
OnlineLibrary.Wiley.com
Express.co.uk
ClimateDepot.com
WattsUpWithThat.com
iTunes.Apple.com

PURE EVIL: How Google steals content, crushes small publishers and monopolizes the internet for profit

If you don’t yet realize how Google has become the most EVIL corporation in the world, check out this article from TheWeek.com which reveals how Google steals content from small publishers, crushes their revenue, puts them out of business and monopolizes the internet.

The article, entitled, “Google is a monopoly — and it’s crushing the internet,” reveals how Google destroys small publishers by literally stealing their content and denying them revenues, putting them out of business:

The latest example of monopolist platform abuse comes from Adrianne Jeffries with the story of CelebrityNetWorth.com. This was a small business started by a man named Brian Warner, who found in 2008 that there was no good data on how much Larry David was worth. After some digging, he figured it out — and discovered that there was tremendous demand for information about celebrity wealth. He started a small media business, eventually hiring a staff of 12 to conduct detailed investigations — sometimes even corresponding with the celebrities themselves.

Then Google came up with an idea for “Featured Snippets,” which places answers to search queries at the top of the search page. Instead of having to click through to find the answer to a question, it will simply tell you a summary of the top search results.

Before rolling it out, Google asked Warner if they could scrape his data and credit him. Warner declined, but Google did it anyway. The algorithm they use for the snippets is notoriously error-prone — and worse, the celebrity net worth ones often failed to credit his site. Many would scrape other sites that had themselves aggregated CelebrityNetWorth.com. The overall result was devastating:

In February 2016, Google started displaying a Featured Snippet for each of the 25,000 celebrities in the CelebrityNetWorth database, Warner said. He knew this because he added a few fake listings for friends who were not celebrities to see if they would pop up as featured answers, and they did. “Our traffic immediately crumbled,” Warner said. “Comparing January 2016 (a full month where they had not yet scraped our content) to January 2017, our traffic is down 65 percent.” Warner said he had to lay off half his staff.

Google deliberately destroys businesses, in other words, while stealing their content to consolidate yet more power and profit for themselves. That’s how monopolies operate, of course: Consolidating power and influence while destroying anyone who might threaten their position of dominance.

Why it’s now urgent to break up the Google monopoly and save our Republic

The Google monopoly needs to be broken apart for the good of consumers, competition and freedom of information. If we allow Google to continue to monopolize search, videos, ad revenues and even advanced robotics, we are going to soon wake up in a world where Google is overthrowing governments and nations, running the world as a monopolist, fascist corporation.

As I describe in this article about Google evil:

If we don’t stop Google, it’s only a matter of time before Google’s robot division attains sufficient physical capabilities and A.I. prowess to be unleashed as Terminator-style Hunter-Killer robots to target human beings on the battlefield (or perhaps to even target political enemies). It’s not as far off as you might suppose. Before you know it, Google will be building massive armies of corporate-run robot soldiers, and Google will become a military might unto itself. What will Google do with all that power?

As Google itself has already demonstrated, it will wield power to silence its enemies, suppress the truth, enslave humanity and dominate everything in sight. It’s not difficult to see how, given another 25 years of such evil run amok, Google could overthrow entire nations and supplant the governments we know today with its own totalitarian corporate dictatorship. To envision how Google might operate in a future where it controls the most dangerous humanoid robots armed with weapons, just ask yourself how Google operates today. Does Google respect humanity or does it try to enslave it? Does Google tolerate competition and criticism, or does it try to silence those who speak out against it? Does Google protect the privacy of its users, or does it sell you out with back door access to the NSA that violates your Fourth Amendment privacy every second of every day?

The answer is abundantly clear: Google has become the world’s most evil — and dangerous — corporation. It has become a danger to human freedom, human knowledge and even human life. If we don’t stop Google’s march toward totalitarian dominance, the future of our world will look like a destitute dystopian society of enslaved humans, all kept ignorant and uninformed about reality (thanks to Google’s suppression of truth).

No criticism of the “accepted, fact-checked reality” will be allowed on YouTube, Google or much of the internet, as any person who dares contradict the Leftist totalitarian narratives will be immediately stripped of ad revenues, search engine visibility and public credibility.

Google — which should probably be renamed “OBEY” — will have achieved its ultimate goal of silencing all dissent, controlling all knowledge and overthrowing any governments that oppose it. In this future, Google will run all elections, and all winners of such elections will be little more than Google’s puppets, rubber stamping their legislative schemes that continue to grant more power to everything Google.

Freedom will die.

Dissent will become extinct.

Reason will be labeled “hate speech.”

Conformity will be mandatory.

And one day, half the human population will be declared “obsolete” and no longer needed by the globalists because Google’s advanced robots will replace human labor. At that point, the depopulation ovens will run 24/7, all powered by Google’s A.I. algorithms, of course, which will calculate the most efficient expenditure of energy to terminate a human life.

This is the future for humanity if Google is not stopped.

Google invents “snowflake” technology making computers feel offended and intolerant just like college students…

Be careful what you search for online because you might just end up “triggering” your search engine. In an effort to combat what it deems as inappropriate internet content, tech giant Google has reportedly tweaked its search platform to get “offended,” like a human would, whenever someone searches for something that Google has flagged as vulgar, such as videos of the terrorist group ISIS beheading or shooting its victims.

Similar to how a college student majoring in women’s studies might respond to a fellow classmate who suggests that men are the more rational of the two sexes, Google now has the ability to get upset and throw a fit whenever someone searches for something that the system doesn’t like, effectively hiding it from view.

Following the recent terror attack in Westminster, outcry over the ease with which members of the public can search Google for, say, a handbook on how to effectively blow up a building, has led to efforts that would block such information from ever appearing in Google search results. It’s censorship disguised as “terror prevention,” and something that the world is likely to see more of as corporations like Google coalesce to it.

According to reports, Google is busy at work refining this tracking tool to better identify “inappropriate” content in order to basically pull it from the web. Consequently, users who search for anything on the Google blacklist, even for educational or other purposes, will now have their search results filtered and sanitized without their consent.

“Currently teams of humans are checking the systems to see if they are doing a good job,” reports the Daily Mail Online about this first phase of the program. “Google now wants the computers which monitor content being uploaded through YouTube and other channels to understand the nuances of what makes a video offensive.”

Google to eventually hand over control of internet censorship to AI-like computer systems

As part of a dual effort that includes also trying to stamp out so-called “fake news,” Google hopes to eventually convert its censorship system, which currently relies on human oversight to identify “offensive” content, to one in which computers alone will be able to make that call. Human input won’t even be necessary; in other words,  AI-equipped computer systems will eventually be able to do all the censoring on their own.

The way that Google hopes to construct such a system is to continue feeding it a stream of human-vetted examples of both “safe” and “unsafe” content, from which it can effectively learn the differences between the two over time. YouTube videos, for instance, will continue to be broken down frame by frame and analyzed by a human being whose job it is to teach the system using data patterns.

As for the current success of the program, Google claims that its system is already flagging five times more content than it had prior, though the company has yet to release official figures to prove this.

“Computers have a much harder time understanding context, and that’s why we’re actually using all of our latest and greatest learning abilities now to get a better feel for this,” says Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, about the endeavor.

Taking the program another step further, Google also hopes to eventually develop a system in which potential ISIS recruits and other suspected terrorists can be fed customized advertising content on their Google advertising banners that will deter them from wanting to join jihadist groups. As it turns out, there is apparently a very high demand for ISIS material online, experts claim, that needs to be better addressed for national security purposes.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Wired.com

Google, Facebook algorithms a whole new kind of “Orwellian censorship,” warns News Corp CEO

We all learned in grade school that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the freedom of speech for all Americans. What some people may not know, however, is the historical context behind freedom of speech. Like most other amendments in the Bill of Rights, the right to speak freely and openly was meant to be a check on the federal government. In most other countries during the time of our founding and even in many countries today, citizens are tortured or even killed for speaking out against the government. The Founding Fathers wanted to break from that type of system and empower the people to speak up if and when the government begins to take steps towards tyranny.

Today, there is an ongoing effort within the progressive movement to silence speech that is not aligned with their ideology – that is, any speech that promotes the tenets of conservative republicanism. Whether it’s talk radio, college professors and administrations or on social media, the left’s assault on free speech is relentless. Such censorship will no doubt put America on a slippery slope, and may one day lead to the formation of a centralized, tyrannical state.

This is essentially the point being argued by Robert Thomson, the Chief Executive Officer of News Corp. Thomson warns that algorithms used to censor certain speech on Facebook and Google have “left us perched on the edge of the slippery slope of censorship.” Thomson’s comment comes in response to an investigation that was conducted by The Times, which revealed that automated adverts often place brand name products on pornography and extremist websites. For instance, the investigation found that an authorized Nissan dealer’s advertisements were automatically placed on the YouTube page of the far-right English Defense League. Additionally, an advertisement for Argos was shown alongside sexually explicit YouTube videos, and an advertisement for Marie Curie, a charity based in the UK, was found on a racist song that was posted by Combat 18, a neo-nazi terrorist cell.

While speaking at the Asia Society in Hong Kong, Thomson explained that the issue is actually a lot more serious than damaged reputations. “The embarrassment for these advertisers, naturally conscious of their image, is understandable, but the situation is far more serious than mere loss of face,” he said. Thomson went on to point out that the consequences of these algorithms and the automated adverts could be far more significant than we think. “Because of YouTube, that is Google, there is a real chance that some of these clients have been funding extremism, whether it be Islamist excess or neo-fascist nonsense, depending on the type of advertising….” He added that those who are YouTube partners “could earn about 55 percent of the revenue from a video.”

Later in his speech, Thomson put things a bit more bluntly, saying, “The word Orwellian is flagrantly used and abused. But when it comes to the all-powerful algorithms of Google, Amazon and Facebook, otherwise known as GAF, Orwellian is unused.”

Recently, Google decided to take a page from Facebook’s playbook by altering its news-collection algorithm so that it can locate and censor information it deems fake or inaccurate.

The problem with this endless hunt to find “fake news” on the Internet is that those in charge may very well abuse their power and begin censoring things that should not be censored. Who is to say, for example, that those people who make up Google’s team of fake news hunters aren’t a bunch of leftists out to shut down conservative speech? While today the target seems to be pornography and extremist sites, who is to say that tomorrow it won’t be articles published by Breitbart or Fox News?

The line has to be drawn somewhere. Incidentally, that line was already drawn over two centuries ago in what we call the United States Constitution.

Sources:

PressGazette.co.uk

TheGuardian.com

TheTimes.co.uk