Spinning vaccine propaganda

Here’s a fun experiment you can do from your couch.

Search “which countries use ivermectin to treat covid” using different search engines.

You’ll notice the search results from Google are substantially different than the results from Yahoo or Bing.

Google offers up scare stories.

The other search engines answer the question.

When Google has 90% market share in internet searches, most people will never see what Google’s algorithms are hiding from them.

That’s how our free society rolls. We have created a most free and wonderful public-private-partnership of narrative control.

It’s a beautiful thing…

Remember Arab Spring?

Welcome to Fascist Spring!

Duelling Anti-Christs

 A couple of weeks back I used this space to let you know I was upping sticks and moving to Substack. 

Then I got some feedback to the effect that my new home was invisible on the internet.

I googled it. Nothing. I originally figured it was just too soon. But it was still going on today.

On a whim, I took a look with Bing instead of Google, and voila, there I am!

One of the disturbing aspects of our information universe is that the whole enchilada is controlled by half a dozen billionaires. These guys have way to much money, and can therefore bully everything and everyone to get their way.

That includes investing in AI so you can train algorithms to disappear offensive material out of that universe. Google can't find The Contrarian Ranter. Every other search engine can.

Which is funny. I would have pegged Bill Gates as the Anti-Christ before Eric Schmidt.

February squish factor

Every month I tally up how many views my fresh posts garnered at Blogger compared to Before It's News.

In theory, since I publish on Blogger, the biggest blog host on the web, the looks there should by far outstrip the views at Before It's News, where I'm stashed in the fringe back corner on what's already a fringe website.

However, Google loads up its Blogger platform with a gauntlet of all sorts of algorithms designed to protect the public by squishing misinformation, disinformation, Putin's propaganda, Chinese propaganda, Iranian propaganda... in fact, any propaganda whatsoever unless it's US propaganda, and any other ideas that do not pass the the current groupthink sniff test.

In February I posted 34 stories on Blogger. Before It's News reposted 33 of them.

Views on Blogger; avg of 16.5 views per post for a total of 560.

Views on Before It's News; avg of 77 per post for a total of 2,554.

Algorithms at work!

 

Fake news even more fake than we thought

If you get your news from the Globe and Mail, CBC, BBC, or the major US platforms, you will never see this story.

The UK government has been contracting news organizations and NGOs to influence public opinion in Russia and other "adversary" states. That's another way of saying they are hiring propaganda subcontractors. The documents revealed in this story show that Thomson-Reuters, owner of the Globe and Mail, and one of the biggest media/data/information conglomerates in the world, are hot to trot in bidding for these contracts.

In other words, our "free press" is literally prostituting itself to government agencies for money, all in the name of fanning the flames of anti-Russia hysteria.

Here's a great interview with the guy who broke the story.

Bringing transparency to censorship; Russian politician proposes good news quota

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is the Newt Gingrich of Russian politics. He may be full of shit but none the less he from time to time passes an interesting idea.

In light of the previous post about the French election I was intrigued by Zhirinovsky's suggestion that there be a quota for good news.

For example, the Globe story on the French Presidential election could carry this disclaimer;

Important aspects of this story have been omitted in order to meet the good news quota.

Is that not preferable to having some faceless editor arrogantly take upon himself the responsibility of denying you access to the news? At least now the news consumer knows that he or she is missing something.

Alas, the next conundrum will be who gets to decide what news is "good" news.

Again in the case of the Globe's treatment of the French election, the surging popularity of the hard left might be bad news to the paper's editorial board, but could very well be good news to many readers. Who will decide what is what?