I’ve noticed before that certain films do not show up in some searches, especially those about Palestine or critical of the neo-fascists in the government of Ukraine. Even films such as Where Shall the Birds Fly?, which had an astonishing 9.3 rating on the Internet Movie Database were not to be found on Amazon.
Google searches divert people from controversial, critical-thinking websites — especially those critical of runaway capitalism, media mediocracy, or the Democratic party — to mainstream media such as the New York Times & the Washington Post (which is, perhaps coincidentally, owned by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon).
It’s worth remembering, that governments always suppress dissent — especially when going to war — but the recent attack on truth went full-scale under Obama, who charged whistleblowers such as Assange, Manning, & Snowden, under the Espionage Act. The supreme crime, apparently is telling the truth about criminal acts by government officials.
Here’s what Chris Hedges had to say in his most recent column:
The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, also the founder and CEO of Amazon, has a $600 million contract with the CIA. Google, likewise, is deeply embedded within the security and surveillance state and aligned with the ruling elites. Amazon recently purged over 1,000 negative reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book, “What Happened.” The effect was that the book’s Amazon rating jumped from two and a half stars to five stars. Do corporations such as Google and Amazon carry out such censorship on behalf of the U.S. government? Or is this censorship their independent contribution to protect the corporate state?
In the name of combating Russia-inspired “fake news,” Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by “evaluators,” that hunt for key words such as “U.S. military,” “inequality” and “socialism,” along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 “evaluators” to determine the “quality” and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites such as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt
The column, titled ‘The Silencing of Dissent‘, also deals with other aspects of this and is well worth reading in full.