Left-wing Google censors conservative websites

By Aussiegirl

A very important article from the American Thinker. First China - now the world. I have been fearing this for quite some time. The very size of outfits like Google gives them unprecedented power to regulate the internet, and one wondered now that they have been cooperating with China in censoring content, how long it would take them to start applying their own standards of what is allowable to their own product. Centralized power is always subject to abuse, even when it occurs in the so-called free market.

"Hate speech" is the PC term for thought crime. Google is adopting the European standard that any articles that deal with the reality of Muslim terrorism are de-facto "hate speech". Pretty convenient.

Anyone who blogs on Google's Blogspot.com now has a "flag" attached to the top of their blog so that anyone reading your blog can "flag" your site to Google for perceived hate speech. Google's explanation for this threat of censorship is that they rely on the principle of the "wisdom of the many" -- i.e. -- if you get a lot of complaints then the complaint is probably true. Not necessarily, as all any organized group has to do is to flood your site with seminar "flags" and you are censored. Google says that this will not result in a termination of your blog, merely in your being delisted from their search engine. Thanks a lot. You can imagine that the Muslims have cottoned on to this and are flooding the sites with complaints about anyone printing anything critical of terrorism or Islam.

The modern world is witnessing a curious confluence of socialist censorship and capitalist financial ventures -- so you have a left-leaning free-market business like Google acting like a repressive government, and you have repressive governments like China and Russia engaging in free markets, while still keeping the screws on freedom. And then you have these entities cooperating with one another, like you see with Google, Yahoo, MSN and China, and what you end up having are a bunch of unelected tyrants from both the capitalist free market world and the socialist and unfree world cooperating to restrict individual freedoms in the world. Globalization of political correctness, censorship and loss of individual freedoms and freedoms of the press.

The American Thinker

Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.

At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small (when measured by the size of its workforce) technology corporation a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs even its current financial prowess.

It’s Not So Easy Being A Conservative E-Zine

As reported by NewsBusters, the most recent occurrence of this unexplained phenomenon was Friday, May 19, when Frank Salvato, proprietor of The New Media Journal, realized that his content that day hadn’t been disseminated at Google News as it had been on a daily basis since he reached an agreement with the search engine in September 2005.

After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of “hate speech” at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.

Unfortunately, this was not the first conservative e-zine to be terminated in such a fashion. On March 29, Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message as Salvato informing him that:

“Upon recent review, we’ve found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News.”