The Google Problem

How Google/Youtube Became a Threat To Humanity And What To Do About It

I remember when Google first came out in the late 1990s. Its main idea was to use the idea of how many links there were to a webpage to determine the “authoritativeness” of the link and rank them accordingly. The source of the idea was academic publishing, where the more links to a paper, the more likely it was that that paper was the best, most highly regarded source of the type of information it presented. The outcome was that you usually found what you were looking for in the first two pages of results. You found the authoritative information you were seeking. I was impressed. It was way better than other search engines of the time.

As so often happens, the ne'erdowells whose pages were not ranked highly sought and found a workaround. If being the most cited is the way to get to the top, then create lots of citations to get yourself to the top. Hackers are always one step ahead. Thus was born an entire industry. SEO or search engine optimization. And Google had to tweak and retweak their algos to thwart this activity.

Later this morphed into efforts by some pushing whatever view, agenda, or information they wished to push to use search engines to capture the attention of audiences they wished to reach or manipulate. To me this is not that big a deal, as each individual is responsible for thinking critically and sorting out sense from nonsense. But to those at Google it became a mission to prevent the dissemination of what they consider misinformation.

This effort became turbocharged over the last 6 years to simply remove or exclude sources of information that, in the judgment of whoever is controlling this power at Google (and when I say Google I mean both Google and Youtube), is deemed in some way harmful or for whatever other reason they deem sufficient to suppress information.

Google has arrogated to itself the power to curate reality. They control some 80 or 90% of ALL searches, so this is not some minor thing. Google in their own research in the 2010s discovered they had the power to significantly sway public opinion or political outcomes. Others have also confirmed this power. And they have chosen to embrace and, in my view, grossly abuse this power.

It has been interesting to see what Google says when they notify people that their information or videos are being either demonetized or completely removed from the visible universe.

For instance here is a Google blog content for Youtube regarding health information

• Prevention misinformation: We will remove content that contradicts health authority guidance on the prevention and transmission of specific health conditions, and on the safety and efficacy of approved vaccines. For example, this encompasses content that promotes a harmful substance for disease prevention.

• Treatment misinformation: We will remove content that contradicts health authority guidance on treatments for specific health conditions, including promoting specific harmful substances or practices. Examples include content that encourages unproven remedies in place of seeking medical attention for specific conditions, like promoting caesium chloride as a treatment for cancer.

• Denial misinformation: We will remove content that disputes the existence of specific health conditions. This covers content that denies people have died from COVID-19.

Their complete policy is here.

They will remove content. This means content discussing things like HydroxyChloroquine or Ivermectin or anything that questions the safety or efficacy of the mRNA gene therapy treatments called the COVID Vaccine.

What other content do they remove? James Kunstler has had content removed. He supposedly received email from Google that said: “claims that are demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process,” statements that promote “harmful health claims or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus,” and content that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus on climate change.” Ron Paul had his content censored by Google and they emailed him: “YouTube does not allow content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of the World Health Organization.”

Edit: Just found today, March 12th, a new article by Martin Kuldorff, a Harvard Epidemiologist and co-creator of the Great Barrington Declaration, who was fired from Harvard faculty for his views during the COVID episode. This distinguished scientist claims he too was censored by Youtube.

Here is another interesting example. I have just been watching the Roundtable discussion held by US Senator Ron Johnson in the US Senate about what the players in the COVID Event are hiding. This is an official proceeding of the US Government, held IN the US Senate. It is long but really really important so I am watching it all. Note that the link to the video is to Rumble, not Youtube, which Google owns. Why is that? That is because had they tried to post it on Youtube, a part of Google, the video would almost certainly have been DELETED. Yes deleted. Because the contents of this OFFICIAL US GOVERNMENT PROCEEDING questions the US Government official narrative surrounding both the COVID event as well as the mRNA gene therapy they call a “vaccine”. This is but one of hundreds or thousands of examples of videos, many of them OFFICIAL US GOVERNMENT PROCEEDINGS removed from infospace by Youtube because the contents challenges the official narrative. Mind-blowing. Shocking and completely unacceptable in a free society. And what is more, Google does these things in CONCERT with requests by the US Government Executive branch and shady NGOs and 3rd party groups that are FUNDED by the US Government directly in violation of the 1st Amendment of the Constitution. And they utilize these 3rd party groups precisely because they would otherwise be illegal. Other links surrounding this most important hearing here and here.

Note that they use the word “authoritative” in their justification for censoring content.

This is the great error Google has made. Their policies explicitly state that they remove content at odds with the views expressed by certain AUTHORITIES, like the CDC or the WHO or the IPCC, which are who they rely on to determine what they consider “authoritative. In their own words: “Like all of our policies on health/medical topics, we rely on published guidance from health authorities,” the Google-owned video streaming platform said on Twitter.

In doing so, they have mistaken “AUTHORITY” for “AUTHORITATIVE”.

This cannot be stressed enough. So I will repeat, the FATAL ERROR that Google has made is to mistake “AUTHORITY” for “AUTHORITATIVE”.

I was born in the 1960s. So I grew up in the 70s. One of the most important facets of The Counter-culture Revolution of that time was to QUESTION AUTHORITY.

The problem with conflating “AUTHORITY” for “AUTHORITATIVE” is that if the authorities are lying, as it seems they are doing more and more, whether out of pure evil impulses or in service of some other agenda, then the information Google is serving up, either by hiking the false information from the authorities, or by actually suppressing other information at odds with that preferred by the authorities, is NOT authoritative. You are perverting the public discourse. The user is not getting the authoritative information they seek, and that determination is ultimately up to them, not anyone else. In effect Google has destroyed their own search engine and betrayed the very idea which was its founding value. Rather than discovering what links people choose to determine the authoritative links to surface to the top of search results, they now impose the decision of some few people in their own corporation. This is a mirror of authoritarian states run by elites with some agenda or other. They impose a narrative with little or no regard for what the people want or think. Google now willfully substitutes credentialed sources or State determined sources for truly informative sources.

By conflating “AUTHORITY” for “AUTHORITATIVE” Google has metastasized from a useful information tool into an arm of the State. It is a counter-counter-revolution.

As Michael Benz recently avowed, Google was initially funded by Defense Industry money. They are part of the government information complex. They are part of of the GOVERNMENT curating of reality, in direct violation of the 1st Amendment prohibiting, inter alia, Government control of speech. As if this were in any doubt there is anew article detailing the extreme levels of CIA/NSA and other Government Intel State hiring by Google and Facebook. It is absolutely chilling.

Like the media, rather than questioning authority, it has become a tool of the authorities. Google has gone in league with “THE MAN”.

As my father put it, men are not angels. As a result you need government. Government must have power in order to function. Power corrupts. So you need a force that monitors and checks that power. That is the function of journalism and of information tools in the age of the internet.

That is their DUTY. The only reason for them to exist. But if they are now merely mouthpieces for authority they have abrogated that duty.

The Founders understood this essential need for a vibrant Fourth Estate to watch the watchers. The 1st Amendment to the Constitution is the result.

And what is worse, public opinion is perhaps the greatest check on the abuse of power by the authorities. But if you have distorted and perverted the public discourse, which Google has the power to do, and are in fact doing, this check on power is REMOVED. That is fantastically dangerous. It also means that no vote or mandate for any politics is valid as the open public discourse has not taken place to support it!

What is so amazing, as center-left journalists like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi now often point out, is that the QUESTIONING of AUTHORITY used to be a trait of the LEFT. As in the 1960s and after. The Right was always the home of Authority in the past. Now the left has abandoned one of their most useful traits. Which is to QUESTION AUTHORITY.

Google has become a handmaiden in the effort to subvert any questioning of authority. Google, one of the most powerful informational forces on Earth has become an enforcer in the effort by AUTHORITY to stamp out DISSENT.  Could there be a more vile action taken or mindset adopted taken by one with such massive power?

In doing so, they have not only destroyed their own founding idea for search, but with the power they wield they represent a serious threat to the United States and to Humanity itself.

It is as if we have no recollection of history. At one point the Authorities or the scientific consensus was that the earth was flat, the earth was the center of the universe, the earth was 6000 years old, there were no large glaciation events, the surface of the earth was fixed and so on.

Challenging these bits of "consensus" was enough to get people burned alive at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition.

Google is now in the business of destroying the very basis of Science itself. Google is supposed to be populated with utter brainiacs who have passed special rigorous tests of their intellectual rigor. But as ANYONE who values science knows, there is NO SUCH THING as scientific consensus. The methods of science are ALWAYS and everywhere to question scientific results or proclamations or theories or positions. Yet here is Google saying they will REMOVE CONTENT and DEMONETIZE people if their content is at odds with the position of The Authorities.

Now Google IS the Spanish Inquisition. They decide what you can see and hear, but more importantly, what you cannot see and hear.  As the inquisition sought to snuff out heretical viewpoints about the Earth being the center of the universe by persecuting Galileo, so Google seeks to silence those who would question Authority on issues like COVID and now, more importantly, the Climate Question. How is that for “Don’t Be Evil”!

And the level of woke control at Google is a related problem. This recently surfaced with the absurd results generated by their Gemini AI with respect to questions of Race (in my view there is no such thing as race, there is only one race, the Human Race, that is what the genetics says). In any event you can read about that here, here or here where we learn that the Google AI also considers labeling Communism Evil as incorrect, or that it is not possible to determine whether Elon Musk or Hitler is worse. And now Musk claiming that woke Google blob will not allow its AI to be fixed, the AI which will be at the heart of the information services used by the majority of people on earth. Absolutely chilling...

And it keeps getting worse. Today, Leap Day, Matt Taibbi writes a piece where Google’s AI is now just making shit up. And in a libelous dangerous way toward Taibbi. He wrote to Google and received this as part of the response from Google: “Gemini is built as a creativity and productivity tool, and it may not always be accurate or reliable.” You are loosing an Artificial Intelligence on the world, as the MAIN gateway to the universe of information for the largest part of the world’s population and it may not be accurate or reliable? Now you are describing Google itself I fear. Just Wow.

This piece has become much longer than I had intended so I will simply cut to the chase.

Google has become a force for Evil in the world

If you use Google regularly, or Youtube, you are supporting Evil. Do not rely on Google. Not only have the quality of their result sets significantly declined, they are morally reprehensible as an entity.

As a result, to the extent possible

1. Do not use Google for search and

2. set something else as you default search engine on all devices, DuckDuckGo is a decent alternative

3. Do not ever use the Chrome browser, it is used to track you

4. Do not use an Android phone. It is part of the Google ecosystem

5. Do not use Youtube where possible and actively encourage content creators to use Rumble instead

6. Do not use the word "Google" in place of "search engine" Use the word "Search" instead

They have crossed the line from ensuring free and open debate to promoting certain points of view and worse, those views coming from highly suspect Authorities. As an internet utility, they have crossed a bright red line.

They have destroyed the promise of the internet.

They represent a mortal threat to the United States and indeed the entire world.

Canonically, as a private corporation they can do what they want. But as a matter of public policy this is catastrophically damaging to the polity.

Hence the government and the populace has an interest in preventing this block to the proper formation of public opinion, the most important thing in a democracy. While my friends consider me an arch-conservative (though I am really not), which would include a strong inclination against government meddling in private affairs, in this case the threat posed BY Google is so dire I would propose the following as the only viable solution, even if RFK Jr. wins his censorship suit against Google and the SCOTUS eventually were to pare back Google’s suppression of a universe of ideas they deem contrary to authority.

Were I Dictator for a Day I would shut Google and Youtube down completely. By force, by legislation. Zero out the value to their shareholders and bondholders, if any. Open source all of their codebase. Auction off their property to the highest bidder. Enjoin all of their employees and shareholders and bondholders from ever participating in any internet business for the duration of their lives, as the SEC does to market malefactors.

This may seem extreme. But in my view, the damage being done by Google to the very fabric of human society is so great, I argue it is justified.