How Google is Controlling the Russia - Ukraine Narrative

I just received this email from Google which hosts my blog on its Blogger platform:

 

It would appear that I'm not allowed to think for myself, Google will do the heavy lifting for me because I'm incapable of right think when it comes to the bad Russia/good Ukraine narrative.  Those of us who have not subscribed to the Big Tech-approved narrative have been facing this sort of censorship since 2020 when we were told what was acceptable thinking during the COVID-19 pandemic.

  

George Orwell was prescient.  Sadly, we need to make 1984 fiction again.

YouTube - Further Controlling the COVID-19 Vaccine Narrative

For those of you that have read George Orwell's 1984, one of my favourite books, Winston Smith, an employee at the ironically named Ministry of Truth, is responsible for destroying history that is inconvenient to the Party.  Over the past two years, it has become increasingly obvious that we are living under the same sort of authoritarianism, in this case, led by the world's social media platforms.

  

In its latest move to destroy any narrative that doesn't follow its preferred version of the pandemic and accompanying vaccine rollout, YouTube, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent company, has made the following announcement:

 

 

Here are some highlights:

 

"Crafting policy around medical misinformation comes charged with inherent challenges and tradeoffs. Scientific understanding evolves as new research emerges, and firsthand, personal experience regularly plays a powerful role in online discourse. Vaccines in particular have been a source of fierce debate over the years, despite consistent guidance from health authorities about their effectiveness. Today, we're expanding our medical misinformation policies on YouTube with new guidelines on currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO.

 

Our Community Guidelines already prohibit certain types of medical misinformation. We've long removed content that promotes harmful remedies, such as saying drinking turpentine can cure diseases. At the onset of COVID-19, we built on these policies when the pandemic hit, and worked with experts to develop 10 new policies around COVID-19 and medical misinformation. Since last year, we’ve removed over 130,000 videos for violating our COVID-19 vaccine policies."

 

Notice how proud YouTube is of its ability to remove over 130,000 videos.  Way to go, YouTube!

 

So, what is being banned?

  

"...content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines will be removed. This would include content that falsely says that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that substances in vaccines can track those who receive them. Our policies not only cover specific routine immunizations like for measles or Hepatitis B, but also apply to general statements about vaccines."

 

YouTube claims that they have consulted with local and international health organizations and other experts when designing their program of antivaccine censorship.  I'm guessing that the World Health Organization aka the Bill Gates Health Organization was part of the team which helped establish YouTube's guidelines.

 

Not to worry though, YouTube is still allowing content that is important to the ongoing debate regarding vaccines and will allow the following:

 

"...we will continue to allow content about vaccine policies, new vaccine trials, and historical vaccine successes or failures on YouTube. Personal testimonials relating to vaccines will also be allowed, so long as the video doesn't violate other Community Guidelines, or the channel doesn't show a pattern of promoting vaccine hesitancy."

 

Given that absolutely no scientist has a complete picture of both the harms and protections offered by the COVID-19 vaccines since Phase 3 trials are not scheduled for completion for at least the next year, YouTube certainly seems to have cornered the market on "vaccine truth".

 

Just in case you cared, here is YouTube's newly crafted Vaccine information policy:

 

Joseph Goebbels would be utterly amazed at how easily the social media platforms of the new millennium have been at crafting a narrative that suits their own version of reality.  Unfortunately, YouTube hadn't quite come to the realization that controlling the vaccine narrative is not necessarily in its best interest business wise.  Thanks to YouTube's increasingly heavy-handed censorship, a number of alternative media platforms (i.e. Bitchute, Odysee etcetera) have appeared where censorship is non-existent, allowing determined physicians and researchers to spread their message to the masses.  I hate to tell YouTube, but the world can live without videos of cats and car accidents.

The Cancel Culture Part 2 - The Google Gods Strike Again

Apparently, this blog is now on Google's watch list.  Once again, I have offended the Google Gods by posting something that falls under their ever-watchful, Orwellian eye because it has "misleading content". This is the second time that I have been censored with my first offence being described here.

 

Here is the posting in question:

 

 

The posting contained an open letter that was published by the Ontario Civil Liberties Association in Ontario, Canada telling unvaccinated Canadians that they were not alone and that it is within their rights to say "no" to vaccines that have not been completely tested. 

  

Here are a few highlights:

 

1.) you can say no to a violation of your body.

 

2.) you are within your rights to question whether free and informed consent is possible given that the long-term health effects of the vaccines are not known.

 

3.) you are being targeted by the mainstream media, governments and social media companies which are telling you that you are endangering the world because you refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

 

4.) you are being accused of being a factory for the new Delta variant (and others) because you prefer to rely on your natural immune system.

 

5.) you are right to question the preliminary vaccine trial results.

 

6.) you are right to call for a diversity of scientific opinions regarding the pandemic and the associated vaccines.

 

7.) you should not be intimidated.

 

If you wish to read the entire open letter, you can find it here.  For those of us who are growing increasingly concerned about our individual rights in this totalitarian time, it is well worth reading.

 

Somehow, this message offended the Google Gods whose business model now includes censoring any viewpoint that doesn't follow their own narrow view of the pandemic.  On the upside, the posting was read over a thousand times before Google decided that it was offensive, not a bad tally for this small-time blogger.

God forbid that freedom should reign.  That's oldthink and, as we have learned over the past 18 months, oldthink is doubleplusungood.

 

The Google Gods and the Cancel Culture

After nearly a year and a half of posting many missives on the COVID-19 pandemic, I finally hit the "big time".

 

This message from Blogger was in my inbox this morning:

 

Apparently, this posting was "cancelled" by the Google Gods:

...because it violated Googles Misleading Content policy which you can see here:

 

Since the posting contained very little information other than this graphic which was posted on the World Health Organization's Facebook page:

 

...and my suggestion that the World Health Organization's COVID-19 vaccine agenda is being driven by one of its biggest financial supporters who is strongly pro-vaccine, a stance which cannot be denied, as shown here:

 

 

...along with a few comments on our innate ability to fight off viruses without the use of vaccines, perhaps the Google Gods censored my posting because Google itself believes that the World Health Organization posting misleading information regarding their belief that the COVID-19 vaccines provide a stronger immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus than our natural immune system, part of our evolution that has kept Homo sapiens around for the past 200,000 to 300,000 years....although, I rather doubt that was the "bee in their bonnet".

Perhaps it was my use of the words "propaganda" and "World Health Organization" in the title of the posting.  Let's look at the Cambridge Dictionary definition for the word propaganda:

I am quite willing to admit that my musings gives only one side of the argument if the World Health Organization is willing to admit that their belief in vaccines as a superior form of immunity is also one-sided.

In any case, I feel quite flattered to have finally earned my membership in the "Cancel Culture".  Thank you Google.  All Hail Google Gods.

  

As an aside, it will be interesting to see how long this posting remains up.

Tracking Your Health Data in the COVID-19 Era

 As though the technoplutocracy doesn't already know enough about us, tracking our moves online and in the real world, one of the most pervasive technology companies is promoting a product that uses our health data "so that people can enjoy healthier lives".  

 

Here is the lead in page of Verily's website:

Verily believes that...

"...change in healthcare must happen from the inside. So we're forging deep collaborations across the entire healthcare ecosystem, from academic research institutions to life sciences companies to hospitals and health systems."

 

Verily has partnered with other "like-minded industry experts" to create solutions which will impact health outcomes through their investments in both science and public health initiatives.  Here are some of their partner companies and organizations which reads like a who's who of Big Pharma and Big Medicine:

 

Back in April 2020, Verily announced the following:

The goal of the California community-based testing program was to rapidly screen and test high-risk individuals who do not need immediate medical attention, including frontline healthcare workers and first responders who may have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  Verily notes that, while public health care departments have systems to track positive tests, regional information across counties and health care systems is lacking.  Verily notes that its technology can assist local and state health authorities through the aggregation of testing data, helping these authorities to make decisions about social distancing and other measures including adjusting COVID-19 test screening criteria so that people who need testing will get tested in a timely fashion.

With this in mind, Verily has developed a Community Based Testing Guide as outlined here:

Not only has Verily developed technology for COVID-19 data, it has also developed its Team Healthy program as shown here:

 

Healthy at Work and Healthy at School will "...make going back to work and school safer by combining testing, symptom tracking, data analytics and the latest guidance from the CDC and other public health authorities".  Users will create an account and will log in daily and record whether they have any symptoms of COVID-19 or if they have been exposed to anyone that has COVID-19.  They will also be required to get tested when required by employers or schools, and, most importantly, will stay at home when ordered to by the Healthy at Work or Healthy at School tools.  This is all being done in the name of protecting the user and those around them.  Users will be forced to log their daily symptomology by states and municipalities who are using the Healthy at Work and Healthy at School programs in order to return to work or school.  Verily clearly states that, as of now, it is unknown how long users will have to continue to log in daily to report their health status.

 

My first question about this system involves privacy.  Verily states that:

 

"Healthy at Work and Healthy at School were designed with the privacy and security of your personal health information at the forefront. Data is stored in secure systems, as detailed in the Privacy Policy."

While your information may be stored on a secure server somewhere, Verily clearly states that:

"We collect, use, and disclose your information as described in this Healthy at Work Website Privacy Policy. We provide services to your university and/or employer to make your campus and/or workplace safer from COVID-19. To this end, we may use your information for purposes such as to determine whether you should be referred for COVID-19 testing as part of our testing program, to assess your COVID-19 infection risk, to communicate any test results and your COVID-19 infection risk to your university and/or employer as applicable, to assess your eligibility to be physically present at work and/or campus based on rules and guidelines set by your university and/or employer, to continuously improve the algorithms and procedures we use to assess and attempt to reduce COVID-19 risk, and for any other purposes required by your university and/or employer. In addition to using your data for these purposes, we may use your data to create statistics that do not identify you personally and may be used for improving the testing program, for research, and for public health purposes."

 

While your data may not necessarily identify you, it is important to understand the scope of the data that Verily requires.  Verily will ask for your home address, date of birth, sex at birth, email address, phone number, demographic information, recent travel history, current health status and known contacts with other individuals who may have been exposed to COVID-19 (another way of saying contact tracing whether or not these individuals are users of Verily).  Verily will also ask for your health insurance information including policy number, group identification number, primary insured's name, address, phone number and date of birth.  If you are tested for COVID-19, Verily will receive your test results from your testing site, health care professional and clinical laboratories and then share those results with your employer.

 

All of this strikes me as highly invasive, but, not terribly shocking given people's willingness to share pretty much everything with everyone.

 

Let's close this posting with a screen capture showing which company has created Healthy at Work and Healthy at School:

 

That's right, Alphabet aka Google.  Are you surprised?   I'm not.  Just think of the personal data that Alphabet can glean from its Verily database!

 

Adam Schiff, Social Media and Censoring the Vaccination Opposition Narrative

In this posting, I'm only going to add a few comments at the end.  I'll let the words of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA28) from back in February 2019 do the talking, keeping in mind that he sent the following letters during the measles outbreak in 2019.

This is what appeared on Adam Schiff's website:

Here is the letter to Google's Chief Executive Officer, Sundar Pichai:

Here is the letter to Facebook's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mark Zuckerberg:

Let's once again look at the four questions that Adam Schiff asked of both companies:

1.) Does content which provides medically inaccurate information about vaccines violate your terms of service?

2.) What action(s) do you currently take to address misinformation related to vaccines on your platforms? Are you considering or taking additional actions?

3.) Do you accept paid advertising from anti-vaccine activists and groups on your platforms? How much has been spent in the past year on advertising on this topic?

4.) What steps do you currently take to prevent anti-vaccine videos or information from being recommended to users, either algorithmically or as a suggested search result?

These questions beg three further questions; 

1.) Who is acting as a "vaccine expert" for Google and Facebook?  

2.) What qualifications do these "experts" have which enables them to accurately decide which information is "misinformation" and which information is scientifically sound?  

3.) Is any information that presents a negative viewpoint on vaccines and vaccinations immediately considered misinformation?

With all of this in mind, let's look back at the 2019 measles scare.  At the end of the first five months of 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced this:

By the end of 2019, this is what the measles case statistics looked like:

Of the 1,282 confirmed cases in 31 states, 128 or 10 percent required hospitalization and 61 or 4.8 percent reported complications including pneumonia and encephalitis.

While the increase in measles cases is concerning, the numbers show that the 2019 outbreak in the United States was hardly earth-shattering.  Nonetheless, this is what Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus, Director of the World Health Organization and pro-vaccine advocate had to say about the global measles problem which resulted in the deaths of and estimated 140,000 people in 2018 according to WHO's statistical modelling:

"The fact that any child dies from a vaccine-preventable disease like measles is frankly an outrage and a collective failure to protect the world’s most vulnerable children.  To save lives, we must ensure everyone can benefit from vaccines - which means investing in immunization and quality health care as a right for all.”

Given that Bill Gates, the world's most outspoken advocate of mass vaccinations, is a major funder of the World Health Organization and Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus' de facto boss, we at least have to question the neutrality of WHO's approach to vaccination for measles and other diseases as well as its use of statistical modelling to estimate the number of cases and deaths related to measles.  This is particularly pertinent in the COVID-19 era since we are all well aware of the inaccuracy of statistical modelling given that it is very much an example of "garbage in, garbage out".

Just in case you were wondering, there just happens to be a list of measles (MMR, MM and MMRV) vaccine-related injuries that apply to petitions for compensation filed under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program as shown (in part) here:

So, if measles vaccines are so safe, why does the United States Health Resources and Services Administration have a list of "covered conditions" for individuals seeking compensation under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program?

In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic and the massive amount of information that is both promoting the pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine agendas, we should not be trusting either Google or Facebook for unbiased and completely scientifically accurate information on vaccinations and the current pandemic.

Addendum

Since money buys politicians, let's take a quick look at how much Bill Gates Inc. (aka Microsoft) has donated to the pro-vaccination Representative Adam Schiff during the 2020 election cycle:

YouTube, Censorship and Our Technology Tyrant World

A recent posting on YouTube's Official Blog gives us a sense of the lengths that Google will go to to ensure that we are all protected from what the Google gods deem as "harmful content".  While the company admits to censoring content that violates its policies, they claim that they are "preserving the power of an open platform".

Google claims that YouTube is "built on the premise of openness" as shown in this quote from Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's Chief Executive Officer, on YouTube's Creator Blog:

"YouTube is built on the premise of openness. Based on this open platform, millions of creators around the world have connected with global audiences and many of them have built thriving businesses in the process. But openness comes with its challenges, which is why we also have Community Guidelines that we update on an ongoing basis. Most recently, this includes our hate speech policy and our upcoming harassment policy. When you create a place designed to welcome many different voices, some will cross the line. Bad actors will try to exploit platforms for their own gain, even as we invest in the systems to stop them. As more issues come into view, a rising chorus of policymakers, press and pundits are questioning whether an open platform is valuable... or even viable....

A commitment to openness is not easy. It sometimes means leaving up content that is outside the mainstream, controversial or even offensive. But I believe that hearing a broad range of perspectives ultimately makes us a stronger and more informed society, even if we disagree with some of those views. A large part of how we protect this openness is not just guidelines that allow for diversity of speech, but the steps that we’re taking to ensure a responsible community. I’ve said a number of times this year that this is my number one priority. A responsible approach toward managing what’s on our platform protects our users and creators like you. It also means we can continue to foster all the good that comes from an open platform."

Apparently, offensiveness is in the "eyes" of Google and the content that the company determines falls outside of its community policies. 

Google has created four principles that outline its approach to responsibility:

In the current posting on YouTube's Official Blog, Ms. Wojcicki focusses on "Remove".  The posting starts outlining improvements that Google/YouTube has made to removing inappropriate content since 2016:

The company claims that it walks a fine line between preserving free expression and protecting and promoting a vibrant community by enforcing its policies.  YouTube's quarterly Transparency Report for the months from April to June 2019 saw the following occur:

Since you cannot read the data, here it is with the percentage and total number of channels removed for each reason:

Spam, misleading and scams - 90.3% (3,676,012)

Nudity or sex - 6.3% (254,482)

Child safety - 1.8% (73,504)

Promotion of violence  extremism - 0.5% (18,831)

Hateful or abusive - 0.4% (17,818)

Harassment and cyberbullying - 0.4% (14,668)

Other - 0.1% (5,811)

When a channel is removed, all of its videos are removed; with the removal of just over 4 million channels, a total of 77,460,820 videos were removed.  Please note that these numbers do not include the channels/videos that were demonetized by Google meaning that the channel creators no longer make money from their YouTube video endeavours.  

Here is a graphic showing a breakdown of videos removed by reason for their removal:

The vast majority of videos that were removed violated YouTube's "spam, misleading and scams" rules.   While YouTube makes a really big deal about removing videos and channels that promote hate, in fact, these videos make up a very small portion of the total number of videos removed in the quarter.  In total, because of a breach of YouTube's hate speech rules, the company removed a total of 111,185 videos or 1.2 percent out of the total of 9,015,566 videos that were removed .   These videos appeared on more than 17,000 channels, five times the previous number of channels that were removed  thanks to YouTube's new rules regarding hate speech.

In addition to the removal of channels and videos, YouTube also uses a combination of people and technology to remove comments that video watchers make.  In the quarter between April and June 2019, a total of 537,759,344 comments were removed, 99.3 percent of which were automatically flagged and 0.7 percent of which were flagged by humans.  This is nearly twice the number of comments that were removed in the first quarter of 2019 thanks to an increase in hate speech removals. 

As I noted above, YouTube is relying heavily on machines to review and flag bad content.  Here is a quote from the report:

"In 2017, we expanded our use of machine learning technology to help detect potentially violative content and send it for human review. Machine learning is well-suited to detect patterns, which helps us to find content similar (but not exactly the same) to other content we’ve already removed, even before it’s ever viewed. These systems are particularly effective at flagging content that often looks the same — such as spam or adult content. Machines also can help to flag hate speech and other violative content, but these categories are highly dependent on context and highlight the importance of human review to make nuanced decisions. Still, over 87% of the 9 million videos we removed in the second quarter of 2019 were first flagged by our automated systems.

We’re investing significantly in these automated detection systems, and our engineering teams continue to update and improve them month by month. For example, an update to our spam detection systems in the second quarter of 2019 lead to a more than 50% increase in the number of channels we terminated for violating our spam policies."

Across Google's world, the company has hired in excess of 10,000 people to address content concerns.

It is quite interesting to note that all of this concern about content on Google's YouTube platform appeared after Hillary Clinton lost the election that she was destined to win in November 2016.  As users of Google's YouTube product, we have to trust that this massive and highly influential arm of America's technology tyrants is really looking out for our good, protecting us from the evil that lies out there just because they are so concerned about our welfare...but only since 2016.

Google's Covert Role in Geopolitics

While it appears that the civil war in Syria is finally winding down, it is quite apparent that Washington and the military-industrial-Congressional complex most definitely did not get the result that it had hoped for; the removal of Bashar al-Assad and the end of the Assad family regime.  Looking back and with thanks to Google and WikiLeaks, we can the see the lengths that the "Deep State" which includes America's technology sector was willing to take to help the Obama Administration and, in particular, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, achieve one of its/her key goals in the Middle East.

Now that we have a clear understanding of why the uprising in Syria was so important (i.e. Israel needed it to assure its nuclear primacy in the region), as promised, here is one of Hillary Clinton's emails dated August 3, 2012 which clearly shows us how Google was willing to help the Secretary achieve her goals in Syria:

The original email was from Jared Cohen, then a director at Google Ideas and now CEO at Jigsaw, the renamed Google Ideas.  Here is his entire resume from the Council on Foreign Relations website where he is touted as one of the great "global thinkers" whatever that might be:

Mr. Cohen was one of the very few members of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's Policy Planning Staff that remained when Hillary Clinton took over in 2009 under the Obama Administration.  He left this position on September 2, 2010, taking a position with the Council on Foreign Relations and was also hired as the first director of Google Ideas (aka Jigsaw) in October 2010.  For those of you who are not aware of Jigsaw, it is a technology incubator that was created by Google with the mantra that it is using its capabilities to build "tools to make the world safer".

The aforementioned email by Mr. Cohen's to the Deputy Secretary of the State Department William Burns briefly outlines how Google in partnership with Al Jazeera was working on a tool that would help the United States track the Syrian conflict, particularly, defections from the Assad regime, which would give Washington an insider's viewpoint of how the civil war was progressing.  

Google/Jigsaw is quite proud of this achievement, touting it on their " Projects - Made possible by Jigsaw" webpage as shown here:

Here is a screen capture from Al Jazeera showing that this tool was, at best, only modestly successful since it only tracked a total of 103 individuals in total:

As we now know, these defections were really not that important in the grand scheme of the 7 year-long civil war except that the "opposition" mentioned by Mr. Cohen in his email is al-Qaeda.   It is also important to remember that Al Jazeera is a state-funded broadcaster in Qatar and that Qatar has delivered significant quantities of arms to anti-Assad rebel groups since April 2012 as well as making payments to defectors from the Syrian army as you can read here.

Mr. Cohen has a long track record of geopolitical maneuvering in the Middle East.  Here is an email from Stratfor in February 2011 outlining Mr. Cohen's involvement in the Iranian uprising of 2009 when he persuaded Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to postpone the scheduled maintenance on the twitter platform because it could quash the viral spread of protests in Tehran during the Green Revolution:

According to Fast Company, Cohen's actions violated the Obama Administration's policy of non-interference, prompting President Obama to as "Who is Jared Cohen and why haven't we fired him yet?"

Here is another email discussing Mr. Cohen's involvement in Palestine:

In this email, Fred Burton questions whether Google's "billionaire owners" are backing Cohen's efforts for "regime change" and notes that the company's "lefty billionaire owners think that they can change the world".

Lastly, here is another Stratfor email from February 2011 further discussing Google's covert role in Middle East geopolitics, in particular foaming (fomenting) uprisings and meetings with Iranians as part of a Google Ideas projects on repressive societies:

What should concern all of us is Mr. Cohen's (and by extension, Google's) involvement in the melding of diplomacy and technology.  The involvement of Google in world politics is just part of the growing techno-tyrant movement where the billionaires that control Silicon Valley are taking a leading position on telling us what we should and should not believe and forcing their globalist agenda on the world.