You’ve heard all of the hype and hyperbole about fake news on one side and about alternative media on the other side. Each side of the political aisle is typically complaining that the other side is lying and simply not telling the truth about what is going on in the world.
Frankly, that is what you get when you only hear one side of the story, and that’s why we try to give you the side of issues that you don’t hear in the mainstream media. The problem is, though, that, even with alternative media available to get other viewpoints from, you may have difficulty finding an alternate viewpoint. Why? Because the mainstream media isn’t the only group censoring information. The world’s most popular search engine, Google, is actively seeking to censor information, too. Jayson Veley quotes a Breitbart News story about this issue:
“Many people now fear that Google, Facebook and other companies are moving to control and censor their content. Are these fears justified?” asked Breitbart reported Allum Bokhari. “That is absolutely what Google is trying to do,” Hal replied. “The pro-censorship voices are very loud, and they have the management’s ear. The anti-censorship people are afraid of retaliation, and people are afraid to openly support them because everyone in their management chain is constantly signaling their allegiance to far-left ideology. Our leadership (Sundar in particular) is weak, so he capitulates to the meanest bullies on the block.”
Now, an argument can be made that Google, as a private business has the right to do what they want to do, and I understand that argument. The challenge, though, is that Google likes to bill itself as an unbiased information source when, clearly, they aren’t.
And, to make the situation worse, Google also owns other popular websites like YouTube which has started their own censorship program, and Facebook is on the same bandwagon.
We’re not just talking about “hate speech” here, either (though, to have a real dialogue about ideas, people need to be able to say things that other people don’t want to hear); we’re talking about anything that someone on the political left “might” find offensive. For example, a Libertarian writer recently had his Facebook account suspended for 30 days because he posted a meme showing a lady biting into a Tide pod with the phrase “This is why I can’t pay for your health insurance” written across the meme. Clearly, the meme is satire of both the Tide pod challenge craze and also of Obamacare, but the meme doesn’t advocate violence, suicide, or hate. To give you perspective, I don’t recall hearing anything about Facebook banning Kathy Griffin for her picture with the severed head of Donald Trump.
This whole situation means that, if you want to really find out what is going on in the world, you’ll want to find other ways to get alternate viewpoints, such as this website, and you’ll want to be on guard for blatant bias in the mainstream media news that you read, see, and hear and the Google searches and Facebook posts that you see. Vigilance in finding the truth is the only way that you’ll get to the truth because, sadly, it seems clear that Google and other tech media companies are intent on making it harder to find the truth.