by Will Jones, Daily Sceptic:
So, Google has been caught manipulating AI images to ensure they fit with its ideological worldview. The backlash was quick, expected and fully justified. There is only one word to describe Gemini AI and that’s ‘racist’. There are those that will bleat it was just a bug and there is nothing untoward about the AI’s creators, but this is false. AIs always embody the spirit of their creators.
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Based in California and worth more than the entire Chinese stock market combined, Google is the size of Canada’s economy. This is the company the world trusts with 91% of all search enquiries, our latest news, video content, weather reports, maps, email and music selection, among other things. Globally, over 70% of us use its software to run our phones and businesses spent over $230 billion advertising products and services using its platforms in 2023. It’s fair to say that everyone uses a Google product in one way or another.
This is significant because not only does Google hold colossal amounts of your data, it’s also the gatekeeper of the information you receive. Even more worryingly, it’s now manipulating the past.
Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.
— George Orwell, 1984
When it comes to censorship, Google is leading the charge. There is now substantial evidence that Google manually manipulates search results based on its own internal values. Just type in “Jordan Peterson” and see what comes up. Search the “Daily Sceptic” and the second result is Google’s own ‘fact checker’, claiming the site is harmful and a purveyor of ‘misinformation’.
Google controls nearly 90% of all website ads, meaning it can turn up or down the amount of money a publisher can make, or even stop them making any money at all.
Working alongside Google and big tech is an army of NGOs and ‘fact checkers’. Fact checkers such as the Trusted News Network were set up by mainstream media outlets working alongside Google and – like trying to keep cupped water in your hand – this is part of legacy media’s last gasp to control the narrative. Fact checkers claim to review content and ‘rate its accuracy’ – but what they actually mean is ‘determine whether this content complies with my ideological biases’. When content does not pass their warped accreditation process they slap a ‘fake news’ label on it and work with their accomplices in big tech to remove, shadow ban or deprioritise it in things like search engine results. Worse still, they remove the sites ability to use Google’s network to serve ads and therefore, in most cases, are also removing the sites’ ability to generate revenue. (The Daily Sceptic is banned from using Google’s ad-server.)
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and other NGOs like NewsGuard and Graphika aim to assess and rate the reliability of news sources to ‘help’ users assess how trustworthy they are. If NewsGuard deems a website to be trafficking in ‘mis-’ or ‘disinformation’ it will rate it ‘unsafe’ and share that assessment with its Big Tech friends who will then remove, shadow ban or de-monetise the site.
Google and other Big Tech companies also have their own foundations and initiatives to increase their influence, such as Google News Initiative, which “works with publishers and journalists to fight misinformation”. Or there’s Facebook’s Journalism Project, which “partners with news publishers and nonprofits to combat misinformation”, i.e., opinions that run contrary to theirs.
You may be wondering where all the money to fund the censorship industrial complex is coming from?
Apart from mainstream media companies and Big Tech creating and funding their own apparatus of censorship, there is a complex web of philanthropists donating to foundations, and foundations donating to NGOs, and so on. But you don’t have to dig too far to find the usual suspects. George Soros and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have given money to various fact-checking outfits, and everyone from UNICEF to Rockefeller, to the Brown School of Public Health are getting in on the censorship action.
More worryingly, both the U.K. and U.S. governments are also funding and supporting these organisations. The U.S. State Department is violating the U.S. Constitution by funding organisations seeking to silence Americans who question the Government’s claims, according to a lawsuit filed by the Federalist, the Daily Wire and the state of Texas. While in the U.K., the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) was set up by ministers to tackle supposed domestic ‘threats’, and was used to target those critical of the lockdown policy, as well as the Government’s pandemic response more widely. The GDI is part-funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
Big Tech, and in particular Google, has extraordinary power. It is up-ranking its ideological viewpoints and down-ranking anybody who disagree with them. It is also lying to us about it. Google says that there is “nothing to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone”.
Toby and I have recently launched a new ad platform to fight back against Big Tech and ad agencies colluding to suppress free speech and aims to funnel ad revenue to all content creators, not just those deemed acceptable by Google and its partners.
The agents of censorship are pushing a poisonous, anti-Western ideology. They are well funded, well organised and self-righteous, convinced that they are entitled to be the judges of what we can and can’t read. The time has come for those of us who care about free speech to step in and change the game.
