Posted: 9/29/2015 7:49:22 PM EDT
[#12]
Googled, Gobbled, and Throttled: The Road to Samizdat
this is an article from a few months ago about this very thing on 'Fred on Everything'
(selected edits- not entire article)
Googled, Gobbled, and Throttled: The Road to Samizdat
To begin, I suspect that it is simply fraudulent. Much of the news involves violence: Princess Diana’s death, the Rodney King beating, the bombing of Gaza, the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson. So sites have ads removed for covering these?
If Fred On Everything dealt in gore-porn, in grotesque photos of dismembered bodies, Google’s behavior might make sense. However, in over 700 posts spanning more than a decade, FOE has one shocking photo, of a victim of American torture at Abu Ghraib.
there is a pattern in the pulling of ads. In all three cases that I know of, the content of the sites has been of a sort objectionable to the government. Start with FOE, which has been highly critical of Washington’s wars and racial policies.
Earlier, Antiwar.com had its ads pulled by Google, again for posting a photo of an Abu Ghraib victim.
Hmmmm. The endless wars are important to Washington and fill a lot of rice bowls. The feds cannot be happy with an articulate site of large circulation that opposes military adventurism. Since Antiwar depends (I think) on contributions from angels and its readers to stay afloat, pulling ads plausibly seems an attempt to cripple it.
The third site to have ads pulled was American Renaissance, another political site. It opposes mass immigration from the Third World and the sorts of misbehavior by blacks that is reported daily on Drudge, Breitbart, Worldnet Daily News, and European papers.
It is here worth noting that American Renaissance, though invariably painted as a site of extremists, isn’t. For example, the explosive popularity of Donald Trump’s opposition to immigration attests to the very large numbers of Americans who agree with him, and thus with American Renaissance. AmRen is not the home of some fringe. It represents the views of a large number of people whose politics are not acceptable to the politically correct.
But AntiWar.com is another thing. It is a big site, and enough noise was made over the pulling of its ads that higher-ups a Google must have known about it. Further, AntiWar never says anything about the usual forbidden categories of race, feminism, homosexuality, and such. Since I cannot readily imagine that Larry Page and Sergey Brin would on their own want to protect the endless wars, it is perhaps not unreasonable to suspect Washington’s hand. Companies like Google become de de fact quasi-governmental entities. Google’s policies look an awful lot like political censorship disguised as protecting the public from disturbing photos.
Google is essential. It is the card catalog of the world library, more powerful than the governments of many nations. It is virtually the only game in a very important town. It can subtly, or not so subtly, determine what entire populations can easily know. France cannot do this.
To me it is unnerving that such a phenomenally powerful entity should be unsupervised, unaccountable, and probably deeply in bed with Washington. But there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it. Except remove their code.
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