When searching for terms that challenged the official narrative of the Parkland shooting, the results on Google varied drastically, compared to other search engines.
The post Google Caught Red-Handed Censoring Search Results Asking Questions About Parkland Shooting appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Submitted by Nicholas Colas of DataTrek Research
Today we want to expand on our recent thoughts on “What are retail investors buying right now?” We showed last week, courtesy of Fidelity Investments data, that mom-and-pops are still adding to positions even on breakouts in US equities. Further, the names at the top of the retail investor league table tend to be single stock Tech names rather than ETFs. Yesterday, for example, Fido’s retail customers were net buyers of NVDA, AMZN, and BABA and those names were the most heavily traded.
One way to assess general interest in any topic is to see what “Autofills” as you start typing into a search engine box. For example, enter “Buy a” into Google, and in NYC the autofills are: "Star", “bitcoin", “car”, “domain”, “dog”.
We assume the first is a holiday gift idea and the second a reflection of the ongoing crypto craze. And “Bitcoin bites dog” does seems to capture the spirit of the age… Autofill works, after all, by using Big Data analysis to guess what you might type next based on how other users in your area completed the same initial text.
To see which specific equities search engine users express the most interesting in purchasing, we typed “Buy stock in” and then noted what Google, Yahoo and Bing came back with in terms of autofills.
For Google “Buy Stock In” the autofills were: Amazon, bitcoin, Apple, Tesla, Weed
For Yahoo!: Marijuana, Amazon, Facebook, Disney, Tesla
For Bing: Amazon, Nike, Wal-Mart, Google, Netflix
Not surprisingly, technology companies dominate popular investment interest; do not, however, slough this off as less-informed retail investors just buying what they know. The point here is that the general population thinks these are the most attractive investment ideas – stocks they want to, or wish they could, own.
This is one (of several) reasons we question the sustainability of any rotation out of the large cap Tech sector in the context of a continued bull market for US stocks generally. Simply put, for many individual investors technology IS the US equity market. And if those stocks do not continue to rise, their enthusiasm for allocating incremental capital to equities may well diminish. Will they trust a US stock market where financials or industrials are the leadership names?
It is hard to imagine “Buy stock in Citibank/JP Morgan/Wells Fargo” ever making it to the top of the autofill charts.
From the Slope of Hope blog: The main drag here in Palo Alto is University Avenue, which is lined with pricey restaurants and retail. One city to the south of us, Mountain View, has their own main drag, and it"s called Castro Street (not to be confused with the gay mecca in San Francisco, half an hour"s drive north).
I"ve walked Castro many times (again, let"s not confuse the two), and I would often pass a very nice building which was neither a restaurant nor a retail store; on the front was a large sign, QUIXEY, and inside the building were dozens of young engineers, all of whom I"m certain were earning great six-figure salaries, working away at their keyboards. Beneath the "Quixey" name was the tag line: "The Search Engine for Apps"
Now this didn"t make a great deal of sense to me. Why would anyone need a search engine for apps? I mean, if I needed to search for an app, I"d go off and do something crazy like this:
You know......like........do a search. Quixey bragged, "The technology allowed users to search across multiple platforms, eliminating the need for multiple searches using different mobile devices." Ummm, sorry, if I"m an iPhone user, I don"t give a crap about, say, Android apps.
But people with far more money and far more intelligence than me felt otherwise, and thus:
Yes, countless tens of millions poured into the Quixey coffers, valuing the company at way over half a billion dollars for what I"m convinced has to be one of the stupidest and most useless ideas in history. But how are you going to fund free lunches and ping pong for your overpaid twenty-somethings without all this cash, people??
Indeed, although I could only see bits and pieces of Quixey from outside the building, it was apparently a fairly spiffy place for a startup. Its office had themed conference rooms constructed by local set designers, such as Ski Lodge, Picnic, Movie Theater, and Wild West. Hell, they even had Up and Down escalators so the little darlings didn"t have to move their legs to change floors.
So color me surprised when this finally happened:
Strategic options. Got it. Like wondering where your $133 million went.
But this is all too common in the Silicon Valley. VCs, armed with far more billions to throw at ideas than they know what to do with, will just keep hurling the cash until the next Facebook or Google comes along. One home run makes up for a multitude of past sins. And, for those ideas that are too stupid or fraudulent to make it........they just disappear without a trace.
In Silicon Valley"s ongoing crusade to make sure that you only consume mainstream media propaganda, you know because $100,000 worth of Facebook ads crushed Hillary"s campaign and changed the course of human history forever, YouTube has joined the likes of Facebook and Twitter in saying that it will promote more "authoritative sources in search results" going forward. All of which, once again, begs the question of who gets to determine who is an "authoritative source?"
As the Wall Street Journal points out today, YouTube searches for "Las Vegas Shooting" earlier this week included a video from "End Times News Report" with the title "Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG Attack - Shooter on 4th Floor." The video, created by Jake Morphonios who posts YouTube videos in his spare time, quickly went viral and amassed over 1.1 million views in just 27 hours...but all that changed when YouTube decided to censor Morphonios" content and replace it with mainstream media videos...you know for your protection.
For example, the fifth result when searching “Las Vegas shooting” on YouTube late Tuesday yielded a video titled “Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG attack—Shooter on 4th Floor.” The video said there were multiple shooters in Sunday’s mass shooting, a claim dismissed by law enforcement. Posted by a channel called the End Times News Report, it amassed more than 1.1 million views in about 27 hours.
The high search ranking of the End Times News Report video claiming there was a second shooter in Las Vegas helped it gain 371,000 views over four hours late Tuesday. On Wednesday, YouTube removed the video.
Jake Morphonios, who runs the End Times News Report along with a damaged-inventory-liquidation business in Kernersville, N.C., said the video eventually reached 2.5 million views. “It was a hot topic, of course, and was going to get some views anyway, but it really did get caught in [YouTube’s] algorithm and went viral from there,” he said. “Clearly it got into featured videos or something.” The 43-year-old said he has posted about 800 videos and typically gets about 5,000 views each.
He said he aims to offer viewers information on news events that mainstream news sources won’t. “It’s my opinion, it’s my analysis, and everyone’s got an opinion, and I can understand that maybe they don’t want me to be considered the equivalent of The Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or something like that,” he said. “But still, I’m not presenting myself as mainstream media. I’m just a guy with a computer offering an opinion. And to be punished for that is, well, it’s draconian.”
Not surprisingly, YouTube said the the "tweaks" made to their search engines were designed to promote more "authoritative sources," especially when searches are related to "major news events."
In response to criticism on social media of some search results this week, a person familiar with YouTube said the company is accelerating the rollout of planned changes to its search engine. On Wednesday night, the video service began promoting more authoritative sources in search results, especially pertaining to major news events, the person said. YouTube doesn’t disclose how it determines which sources are authoritative.
But while YouTube refused to offer any insights into how they plan to decipher "authoritative sources" from "non-authoritative sources", running the same search for "Las Vegas shooting" today, after YouTube"s "tweaks", provides some clues on their methodology...
Conclusion, YouTube"s "tweaks" have turned it into nothing more than a mainstream media echo chamber.
Google has just released its biannual transparency report disclosing the number of requests governments send for users" private data.
As Statista"s Niall McCarthy details, in the first six months of this year, the search engine giant received 48,941 requests for data while 83,345 accounts were specified in those requests.
You will find more statistics at Statista
That has broken the record for the most Google user data requests in a six month period.
The company complied with 65 percent of the requests, meaning over 54,000 accounts were impacted.
Last week we jokingly wrote about a Facebook press release that was apparently an honest effort by the social media giant intended to summarize Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 election using their social media platform.
That said, at least to us, it seemed as though Facebook unwittingly proved what a farce the entire "Russian collusion" narrative has become as, after digging through advertising data for the better part of full year, Facebook reported that they found a "staggering" $50,000 worth of ad buys that "MAY" have been purchased by Russian-linked accounts to run "potentially politically related" ads.
Now, just in case it isn"t crystal clear why the above statement is so ridiculous, please allow us to demonstrate with one simple chart. This is how the $50,000 worth of "Russian" ad buys on Facebook compares to the $1.2 billion that Hillary spent on her campaign...please note, this is not a mistake...the $50k literally isn"t even big enough to show up on the chart.
All of which means that one of the following three things is true: i) Facebook delivers the greatest ROIC to advertisers in the history of mankind, ii) Hillary is the worst allocator of capital ever or iii) this whole narrative is just beyond dumb.
Of course, despite this relatively simplistic explanation of why Facebook went "full retard" in their attempt to prove that Russians used their website to throw a presidential election, Democrats in Congress apparently don"t get the joke. As The Hill pointed out earlier today, Senate Democrats on the Intelligence Committee are inexplicably using the new Facebook advertising "revelations" from last week to demand a public hearing with a handful of social media giants including Facebook and Twitter.
The top lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee have both signaled interest in having officials from Facebook and Twitter testify about Russian interference on their platforms during the 2016 presidential election.
Warner has been pushing for the companies" officials to testify before the Senate panel, and on Tuesday he weighed in on a report that Russian agents used Facebook to promote protests in the U.S., including an anti-immigrant protest in August 2016 during the campaign.
Facebook shared some details with Warner last week regarding Russia"s election interference. Warner said the company did not reveal to him that Russian actors had created Facebook event pages for anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rallies, which the Daily Beast reported Tuesday.
“I’m disappointed that Facebook didn’t come forward with this information about the Russians pushing people to anti-immigration rallies,” Warner told reporters.
“That somehow that was something they didn’t think was relevant, which is again why I think this is the tip of the iceberg. There’s going to be, I think, much more," he said. “I question whether Facebook has put near the resources they need into getting us all the facts."
Warner said that he has been frustrated by Facebook’s limited disclosures on Kremlin-connected groups using the platform to influence U.S. politics, noting that the company has only revealed a single “troll farm” involved, the Internet Research Group.
Meanwhile, Reuters may have just stumbled upon the key piece of evidence proving that the Russians managed to change the course of American history with just $50,000 in ad buys. Apparently, one series of ads was so effective that it managed to attract the "interest" of 48 people on Facebook to an "anti-immigrant" rally in Idaho...and 4 of them even said they went (again, this is not a typo...that"s 4 people, not 4,000 or 400,000...no, just 4).
The Daily Beast, the news website that first reported on the promoted events posted on Facebook, said one advertisement promoted an anti-immigrant rally in Idaho in August 2016.
The rally was hosted by a Facebook group called “Secured Borders,” which was a Russian front and is now suspended, according to the Daily Beast.
Some 48 people on Facebook expressed an interest in the Idaho event and four said they went, according to a copy of the event page archived by Google’s search engine.
For the record, Idaho hasn"t been a contended state since Lyndon Johnson won it for Democrats in 1964.
So there you have, $50,000 in Russian ad buys on Facebook convinced 4 people to attend and anti-immigrant rally in Idaho and that changed the course of American history forever.
On other news, yes, this is real life.
The moment there is a hard fork, we are going to allow brand confusion to step in. This is a HORRIBLE idea.
The security of the Bitcoin network comes from the computational hash power that the miners bring. This is driven by the price of Bitcoin?—?higher the price, more hashing power. High prices are in turn driven by market demand. Market demand is driven by PR & media and the long term narrative that Bitcoin is the first and only true cryptocurrency which is a long term store of value. If we mess with this, I believe we can expect negative consequences…
When the media declared Bitcoin was dead in 2014, it took us a long time to recover, price wise.
Bitcoin Unlimited will just become an altcoin if it doesn’t have majority support?—?why does it matter?
In the event that 35–50% of miners broke away and created an altcoin, in this case?—?Bitcoin Unlimited, we would essentially then have 2 coins. Bitcoin (BTC) & Bitcoin Unlimited (BTU). One could argue that BTU is not Bitcoin, but it may still be called Bitcoin by the man on the street. For instance, if he buys what he thinks is Bitcoin, to buy some gift cards at Gyft, only to discover that he bought the wrong Bitcoin?—?can you imagine the issues that merchants are going to have now in dealing with the customer support fallout. In all or many cases, they may even remove Bitcoin as a payment method, unless the business is Bitcoin only, in order to avoid customer confusion or the risk of the individual coins fluctuating in price between purchase and usage.
As much as the crypto world is smart enough to understand the differences, the average person barely understands Bitcoin today and forcing them to tell the difference between BTU & BTC is going to be a big challenge.
Let’s not forget some other important points: Roger Ver (the force behind Bitcoin Unlimited aka Bitcoin Jesus) also owns Bitcoin.com (and a number of other strong domain names) and he also owns a couple of hundred thousand Bitcoins (apparently around 300k BTC).
When Bitcoin forks, everyone who is holding BTC, would receive an equal amount of BTU?—?so Roger would have presumably 600k coins (300BTC +300 BTU) according to industry rumours.
The moment Bitcoin splits, he is able to legitimize Bitcoin Unlimited using Bitcoin.com?—?which for the uninitiated would actually be a legitimate source of information, and is highly ranked on search engines like Google. Bitcoin Unlimited would effectively become Bitcoin.com. My first company was in search engine marketing?—?I know this world all too well.
If there was a fork and Roger wanted to pump Bitcoin Unlimited, he could literally dump all his Bitcoin (BTC) holdings into the market. I don’t want to even guess what 300,000+ coins being moved in a short space of time would do to prices, especially after a contentious hard fork where new money investors would already be on the sidelines. This happened to Ether Classic after the Ether Fork?—?the Ether Foundation sold off 90% of their coins and depressed the price. Just the threat of this alone will cause the market to tank for BTC, just for starters. If Roger wants to kill Bitcoin’s price and legitimacy, there is no reason to not fear this and the market will start pricing in this risk.
Roger would not be the only person to sell down BTC. Other BTU loyalists who have two sets of coins would do the same, initially in order to drive down BTC. Conversely, all the long term BTC holders would now receive equal amounts of BTU. Even the most hard core BTC Hodlers would probably sell down BTU with all their BTU coins in order to try and crush it. Given the importance of BTC as a reserve asset in altcoins, many traders could use weakness in price to short BTC and drive their altcoin prices up.
Long story short?—?none of these scenarios (or any others I can think of) play out well for Bitcoin, either in the markets or the media and this fundamental divide means that you’re going to have increased volatility from both sides, as more coins will pour into the market?—?crushing any demand side driven rally.
The whole point about Bitcoin being a long term store of value is that there are only 21m coins, ever. Stability, security and scarcity are the differentiation properties of Bitcoin, a contentious Hard Fork attacks these properties and will be strongly reflected in the price. After a Hard Fork, we will be sitting with 33m “Bitcoins”, on track for 42m and we’ll be having arguments about which one is the legitimate Bitcoin for years to come. You can expect legal cases to arise around the use of the brand, as the Ethereum Classic Investment Trust has shown.
Imagine someone says: I want to buy Bitcoin. Next question is: Which one?! After that, the very next question will be :
“What if one of these coins fork again?—?then we will have 63m coins, and so on and so forth.”
But, aren’t two coins are better than one! The market will adjust!
Let’s say the price of Bitcoin today is $1,000?—?if doing a 75%/25% split would now mean that you have have 2 coins, this should mean they are worth $1,000 ($750+$250). So, I did a simplified calc based on Metcalfe’s law, and it estimated the new coins combined could be worth more than 33% less almost immediately after a Hard Fork due to reduced network effects, and that’s assuming everything went well... With the ensuing FUD and negative press/media?—?you can expect this to drop even further! Bitcoin’s enemies can’t wait for an opportunity like this.
Creating two networks destroys network effects (payment providers, merchants, etc) and the Bitcoin price is non-linear to size of network, so the two coins combined will not equal the same price. You can compare this to the Ether split, as Bitcoin is at scale ($20bn) and Ether wasn’t at the time and it definitely set them back.
Bitcoin has died many times, it can survive a Hard Fork! Even Ethereum did.
Let’s start over. Ethereum is a B2B facing platform?—?consumers & media don’t know or really care about it. Bitcoin is a $20bn asset class. And yes, after the media declared Bitcoin dead after the last “bubble”, it took us 2+ years to rebuild the price by generating demand organically. The media attention this time during the recovery and cross the price of gold does not even come close to last time when it was taking off like a rocket. If a split is portrayed badly in the media and creates confusion, we will possibly go into another 2 years of sideways and down. Do we have that much time again with other competitors on the heels? And let’s be frank, a Hard Fork is not Bitcoin dying. It’s Bitcoin duplicating. Now we have two Bitcoins, both won’t die, maybe one will. Which one is the real Bitcoin? Do not underestimate how many enemies Bitcoin has?—?a fork will just give them all the ammunition they need to confuse the market.
Who cares if 30% of the miners fork off?
Bitcoin’s price is a function of faith and network security, given the large amount of computing power that goes into it. Metcalfe’s law dictates that the value of the network is the square of the network. By splitting the network even 70/30, it’s inarguable that it’s less secure. Yes, it could rebuild but, depending on the price of each coin after the split, hash power may move from one coin to the other. These are highly specialized machines and one coin surges in price, you can expect hash power to follow suit.
Remember that one of the biggest mining companies, Bitmain, is now signaling support for Bitcoin Unlimited. It’s very clear that the current difficulty of Bitcoin makes it harder and harder to compete in this market, but after a Hard Fork, there would need to be a difficulty adjustment on both new forks, given the reduced hash power?—?this opens up the opportunity for Bitcoin mining companies to sell more hardware to miners on both sides of each coin.
The sales of mining equipment are a huge economic disincentive to maintain the status quo without a block size increase, unless the Bitcoin price surges which I don’t believe will happen unless Segwit is adopted and then this debate is over. I called 1300 as a key resistance level and it’s proving to be.
Bitcoin was largely built on the premise that economic forces and self interest would help govern the security of the network. We talk a lot about decentralization but the reality is that the hardware that powers Bitcoin is produced by a handful of companies who also control mining pools which can be used against the network.
The real issue, I believe is two-fold. The community wants Bitcoin to be all things to all people?—?Roger wants cheap coffee transactions, Core wants to ensure its sufficiently decentralized and secure, Vinny wants a store of value, etc.
We have a governance problem in Bitcoin and we have no way to resolve conflict except to fight about it, publicly and given that it’s quasi-democratic, unless we all agree on something, nothing gets done. This has burned a lot of people and I can see why we have so many altcoins out there trying to replace Bitcoin.
Bitcoin cannot be all things to all people, at least, not a for a long time. Right now, it needs to be stable, secure and unchallenged. We can continue to argue amongst ourselves as a community, but for now I am against any contentious Hard Fork that would see us creating two separate code bases with two different brands of Bitcoin.
Companies like Coinbase, BitPay, Gyft, BitPesa, Bitgo and many others have invested years to build consumer adoption and understanding of Bitcoin and create outlets for people to use it. A fork now would undermine all these efforts, investments and limit adoption of Bitcoin in general. Unlike in the Ethereum Hard Fork, 100s of companies use Bitcoin and this would lead to a lot of counterproductivity. Companies should be focused on advancing adoption of their products, not in protocol fights. This debate has already been a strain on the community.
I understand and appreciate many of the different perspectives?—?some which I have not had the time to mention in this post, but given a balance of risks to the Bitcoin ecosystem, I believe that the adoption of Segwit right now is imperative in order for us to get to the next stage in the evolution of Bitcoin and remove the risks of a contentious Hard Fork. The Core Dev team has had a lot of criticism leveled at them and clearly they are not good at community relations, managing perceived conflicts of interests (like Blockstream’s involvement), which has resulted in emotions flaring up against them which is causing an uprising of sorts as we are now seeing. Technically, however, it’s inarguable that they are the best technical team in Bitcoin today.
If we all just breathe out, and put aside our differences and emotions (even just for a while), let’s accept that doing a Hard Fork right now is NOT in the best interest of Bitcoin and let’s please just adopt Segwit.
This post is not trying to be an endorsement or critique of either BU or Core. This post is asking the community to put aside their differences and come together to prevent an irreparable splinter.
I’ll keep posting more links below, but here are few for starters:
Bitcoin Q&A: The dangers of hard forks in protocol evolution https://t.co/BYW413YRg1 via @aantonop
— Vinny Lingham (@VinnyLingham) March 14, 2017
Edina, MN — An Orwellian precedent is underway just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, which could be the downfall of internet freedom as we know it. Police in Edina, MN, have been granted a warrant requiring Google to determine everyone in an entire city who has used its search engine to look up a specific term and identify them to authorities.
The case doesn’t involve some massive terror plot to destroy an entire city or a high-level child trafficking ring. It is for a wire-fraud crime — worth less than $30,000. However, if Google caves to the warrant, it could set off a precedent that will undoubtedly be used by police across the country.
According to Ars Technica, investigators are focusing their probe on an online photo of someone with the same name of a local financial fraud victim. The image turned up on a fake passport used to trick a credit union to fraudulently transfer $28,500 out of an Edina man’s account, police said. The bogus passport was faxed to the credit union using a spoofed phone number to mimic the victim’s phone, according to the warrant application.
According to the warrant, Google must help police determine who searched for variations of the victim’s name between December 1 of last year through January 7, 2017.
The ominously worded warrant makes some chilling demands — all over a small fraud case.
A Google search, the warrant application says, as reported by Ars Technica, reveals the photo used on the bogus passport. The image was not rendered on Yahoo or Bing, according to the documents. The warrant commands Google to divulge “any/all user or subscriber information”—including e-mail addresses, payment information, MAC addresses, social security numbers, dates of birth, and IP addresses—of anybody who conducted a search for the victim’s name.
READ MORE: Police Chief Shot an Unarmed Man and Actually Went to Trial for It, Judge Declares Mistrial
Independent journalist and public records activist, Tony Webster discovered the warrant and posted photos of it online. He has also expressed the grave reality surrounding such broad and sweeping dragnets — and their ability to sweep up innocent people in the process.
According to Webster:
But search warrants require supporting probable cause, not just mere suspicion or theory. For that reason, “anyone-who-accessed” search warrants like Detective Lindman’s can be risky to execute, as evidence could potentially be thrown out in a pretrial motion. Moreover, it’s possible that such a wide net could catch completely routine and non-criminal searches of the victim’s name by neighbors, prospective employers or business associates, journalists, or friends.
Could this type of search warrant be used to wrongly ensnare innocent people? If Google were to provide personal information on anyone who Googled the victim’s name, would Edina Police raid their homes, or would they first do further investigative work? The question is: what comes next? If you bought a pressure cooker on Amazon a month before the Boston bombing, do police get to know about it?
Holy shit. Case name should be In re Minnesota Unconstitutional General Warrant. Nice job unearthing @webster https://t.co/lGUd6s32dt
— Andrew Crocker (@agcrocker) March 16, 2017
Prior to the actual warrant, Edina police sent Google an administrative subpoena “requesting subscriber information for anyone who had performed a Google search” for the victim’s name. However, according to the documents posted by Webster, Google easily refused to comply with that order as it does not have a judge’s signature.
However, after Google balked at complying, authorities pushed back even harder.
READ MORE: BREAKING: "Doors Stormed" Ferguson Protesters have Occupied the STL Police Department
“Though Google’s rejection of the administrative subpoena is arguable, your affiant is applying for this warrant so that the investigation of this case does not stall,” officer David Lindman wrote the judge in the warrant application.
The good news is that Google, while they declined to specifically address the warrant, appears to be fighting it.
“We aren’t able to comment on specific cases, but we will always push back when we receive excessively broad requests for data about our users,” Google said in an e-mail to Ars.
If Google does comply with this order, the implications for what comes next are shocking, to say the least. Political activists, peaceful anti-establishment folks, and any generally but peaceful subversive individual could be identified and rounded up through this process. If ever there was a time to change your habits and begin using startpage.com, it is now.
As the Free Thought Project has previously reported, Google maintains a record of not only your entire search history but also your browsing history and voice recordings of all sounds associated before and after you say the words, “Okay Google.”
If you would like to know how to find out what Google has on you, how to stop it, and how to clear all of your data from their database, you can do so by clicking this link.
Via Mac Slavo of SHTFPlan.com,
Within hours of the election of Donald Trump the mainstream media, their politico counterparts and social media operatives began spreading the narrative that the President was only elected as a result of the dissemination of fake news. The term itself became a rallying cry for everyone from major search engines to massive social media websites who said they would create fact checking teams within their organizations to ensure only legitimate news and information would be listed on their respective platforms. Soon, the leftist media began spreading lists, none of which were backed with any actual evidence, of supposed “fake news” purveyors and Russian propaganda websites. The lists included some of the most highly trafficked non-mainstream websites and aggregators around the world. As these Silicon Valley behemoths and popular news organizations mobilized, so too did mainstream advertising agencies, one of which quickly pulled advertising from the purported king of fake news, conservative leaning news organization Breitbart.com.
The battle was clearly on. And to this day, it continues in earnest. Legitimate news is being buried in feeds and search engine pages, while the effort to directly attack the revenue of alternative media websites continues to expand.
Several weeks ago Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com penned an alert in which he reported that a shadow organization had contacted him with an offer to either help them take down Infowars founder Alex Jones, or be destroyed. Adams, being a long-time proponent of free speech and liberty, took to the internet to expose them instead. Naturally, the skeptics laughed it all off as another conspiracy theory.
Except just days after Natural News posted the warning, Infowars was suddenly dropped by one of the world’s largest online advertising agencies, reportedly costing the network some $3 million in revenue. And within a week of that attack, the largest search engine in the world delisted some 140,000 NaturalNews.com pages from their search results.
While this may seem like no big deal for the average reader today, what these recent actions demonstrate is that a conglomerate of traditional news media, big business and political operatives are actively working to suppress the reporting of information that runs counter to the mainstream agenda.
First they come for the purveyors of truth and information that has remained hidden from the masses for decades. Next they will come for those who publicly discuss their views and and ideas on social media and other forums. And while you may not fall into any of these two categories, make no mistake, as SGT Report warns in the following must-watch report, one day they will come for you, too.
They’ll be coming for all of us… Because this is an orchestrated attack against truth… I cannot imagine living in a time in the United States of America where this is allowed to stand…
As of this morning Google has reinstated NaturalNews.com, though the original reasons provided by Google, which claimed this was a technical issue involving a small number of outdated pages on the website, were unable to be duplicated by numerous well known SEO websites and cyber sleuths. Curiously, as Health Ranger Mike Adams notes in his statement on the censroship, the very same technical issues actively exist on mainstream websites like CNN and Huffington Post, though their pages have yet to be delisted in the same manner as Natural News.
Based on the evidence, we are hard pressed to find any legitimate reason for why Mike Adams’ 140,000 pages would have been delisted, save for the fact that this was a direct attack against his alternative viewpoints on health, politics and a number of other issues. And though Google as an organization may not have been fully aware of the reasons behind the delisting, someone had to push the button. That the button push came just days after the aforementioned warning Mike received to either play ball or be destroyed is highly suspicious.
There is a concerted effort to shut down views and ideas that run counter to the status quo. Today it has come in the form of silencing the most vocal critics. Tomorrow, they may try to silence you.
Mike Adams discusses the delisting and reinstatement of his website on The Common Sense Show:
