The Patriot Post® · Google Censorship Kicks Into High Gear
It’s no secret that Big Tech is especially committed to promoting leftist ideology. This reality has been borne out in its various efforts to silence, censor, and ban alternative voices, including those of many conservatives, all under the guise of preventing the spread of “misinformation.”
Advocating for and seeking to protect Americans’ free speech rights is clearly not a priority for the likes of Google, which recently announced its decision to demonetize YouTube videos posted by people it classifies as “climate deniers.” Google explained that this would “include content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.”
Wrestling with such questions is called scientific inquiry and political debate. Google calls it “misinformation.”
Google defended its speech-penalizing decision by claiming that “advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content.” At least for now, Google has not outright banned YouTube content creators who fail to toe the climate alarmists’ line. But if creators can’t earn money doing it, will they expend the time and effort?
However, if you happen to be a content creator who has a problem with vaccines — and not merely the COVID-19 vaccine, but all vaccines — then you are an anti-vaxxer and Google will be banning you. NBC News reports, “YouTube already had a policy against Covid vaccine misinformation, but the new ban against broader vaccine misinformation includes content that falsely claims approved vaccines are dangerous or ineffective, including the false belief that vaccines cause autism or cancer.”
To be clear, your Patriot Post editorial team is not anti-vaccine, nor are we anti-COVID vaccine. We believe vaccines in general have a long and strong track record for effectiveness against diseases that is borne out through both historical record and sound scientific evidence. Furthermore, the newly developed COVID vaccines appear to present a promising step forward in vaccine technology development.
That said, compelling individuals to get the vaccine under the threat of loss of employment is to do violence to the very concept of individual Liberty upon which our nation was founded.
Google’s decision to put its powerful thumb on the scales in both the climate and COVID vaccine debates by anointing itself as the arbiter of truth will only create more division. If Google is so concerned about stopping the spread of misinformation, then why is it not banning YouTube videos that claim men can be women and vice versa? It’s a scientific fact that there are only two genders. Yet Google not only has no problem allowing the questioning of this sound science but in fact promotes the denial of this reality. Or what about those abortion advocates who falsely claim that a preborn child is not a human being? Why isn’t Google jumping in to stop the spread of this scientific misinformation that literally leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of preborn children every year? Who are the science deniers?
The reality here is that Google is acting to limit and censor speech it deems problematic based on its own leftist ideological perspective, not because of any real concern for contending for the truth.