For fourteen years I have been blogging about privacy, civil rights and the surveillance state. And within the past 3-5 years, I’ve experienced soft bans on social media.
People tell me when they tried to re-post my stories to Facebook or link to my former blog (https://massprivatei.blogspot.com), they would receive a notice that my blog violated Facebook’s guidelines. I shrugged and said who cares, I don’t have a Facebook account.
When Propornot.com, FactCheck.org, NewsGuard and Mediabiasfactcheck.com started popping up and declaring alternative news websites and stories to be fake or propaganda mills I should have seen what was coming.
But all that changed when the first of Big Tech’s long tentacles decided to ban my ‘Weekly Privacy/Civil Rights News Stories’, stories that I have been posting since 2018.
Google claimed that I had violated their “guidelines” by posting politically incorrect news hyperlinks on May 16th and then unpublished it on June 7th.
Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines
(https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we
allow-- and don’t allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Weekly
Privacy/Civil Rights News Stories (5/16)" was flagged to us for review. We
have determined that it violates our guidelines and have unpublished the
URL
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2022/05/weekly-privacycivil-rights-news-stories_16.html, making it unavailable to blog readers.
Was it one, two or perhaps twenty hyperlinks to news articles that Google didn’t like? I will never know. But one thing is certain, Big Tech’s power to control alternative news sources threatens the freedom of the press like nothing we have ever seen.
When people are banned for posting links to stories of news articles that post opposing views of Big Tech, then our chances to see both sides of an issue becomes severely limited.
When politicians and the Feds began asking Big Tech to censor and or ban people for writing alleged fake news articles, I knew things would eventually get worse.
It began with Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006 and really took off in 2018 when they began banning videos promoting gun sales and anyone questioning or even joking about vaccines in 2019.
I mean who decides what is fake news? Is it one person, a group of people, or an AI that flags news stories with keywords like vaccines, guns, China, Israel the Ukraine etc?
I have been blogging for fourteen years and have written hundreds of stories about attacks on our civil rights, the press and the ever-growing police state. But being banned for posting links to news stories is a new low even for Google.
The right to say what you want used to be the cornerstone of democracy but instead our politicians and Big Tech are using it to silence people with opposing views.
Google hasn’t told me which one of the news links violated their guidelines but if I want to, I guess I can delete them one by one and hope they let me republish it. The post can be viewed here:
If you are interested in republishing the post, please update the
content to adhere to Blogger’s Community Guidelines. Once the content is
updated, you may republish it.
“As you may know” Google, I will not be re-posting my story in the hopes that one of the news links you didn’t like gets deleted. Dear Google, you can take your community guidelines and shove it.
Those who value our freedoms must speak out and defy the alt-right’s ban on news that they don’t want the public to see. I hope this is not prophetic but I see a day when even platforms like Substack are banned.
If we lose the right to speak out in opposition to the mass-media and corporate-owned news outlets then freedom of the press will truly be a thing of the past and they will have won.
The veil of fighting fake news has been revealed for exactly what it is: a cover to ban anyone from speaking out against the party line.
I will not be told by Google what is and what is not allowed to be written about.
So from this moment on, I will be posting all of my content here on Substack.
