Source: Prison Planet
Paul Joseph Watson
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
Paul Joseph Watson
Former fellow of George Soros’ Open Society and current Stanford
University scholar Evgeny Morozov has called on Google and other search
engines to become thought crime enforcers, by providing warnings about
websites that contain “conspiracy theories” such as the belief, held by
a majority of Americans, that global warming is not primarily
man-made.
Morozov, whose biography confirms him as a well-connected insider, decries in a Slate piece
how the Internet is a useful tool for “People who deny global warming”
as well as “the anti-vaccination movement,” calling on Google to
provide a “socially responsible curated treatment” that would
marginalize such beliefs by amending search results.
His solution is to, “Nudge search engines to take more
responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control
in presenting search results for issues like “global warming” or
“vaccination.” Google already has a list of search queries that send
most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy
theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus,
whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to
send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists,
Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise
caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources
before making up their minds.”
Morozov describes the potential that such a move will be judged as
Google “shilling for Big Pharma or for Al Gore” as “a risk worth
taking”.
This represents a similar argument to Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration,” an effort by Obama’s information czar to slap government warnings on controversial websites (including those claiming that exposure to sunlight is healthy). In a widely derided white paper,
Sunstein called for political blogs to be forced to include pop ups
that show “a quick argument for a competing view”. He also demanded
that taxes be levied on dissenting opinions and even suggested that
outright bans on certain thoughts should be enforced.
Giving companies like Google, which has grown to virtually become the gatekeeper of the entire Internet itself and is already engaging in SOPA-like acts of censorship,
the power to denote which political and scientific positions are
acceptable and which are fringe “conspiracy theories” is an insult to
free thinking and smacks of Chinese-style thought control.
Morozov’s argument is also completely undermined by the fact that
the two so-called fringe “conspiracy theories” he forwards as being in
need of Google’s thought crime control, skepticism about global warming
and the dangers of vaccines, are views held by millions of Americans
and are not “fringe” at all.
According to the most recent polls, less than half of Americans now believe that global warming is caused by human activity, a number that has been slipping for the past several years.
In addition, polls show
that a quarter of Americans, some 75 million of them, believe that
vaccines are unsafe and can cause autism. To characterize this as a
minority conspiracy belief is like labeling Catholicism as a doctrine
of a tiny fringe.
At best, views about global warming and the safety of vaccines can
be described as being split, but to claim that skepticism over man-made
climate change and the dangers of inoculations are “kooky” fringe
conspiracy beliefs, as Morozov does in his article, is brazenly
inaccurate and exposes the agenda-driven bias of his rhetoric.
This is further illustrated by the reader comments, which almost
universally deride Morozov and attack his argument as being a thinly
veiled demand for Internet censorship.
“The day Google starts doing things like this is the day I find a new search engine,” writes one.
“So, you are a supporter of internet censorship? Only of information
that you disagree with, of course. So I assume Slate and NAF did not
support the recent action regarding SOPA?” adds another.
Morozov’s rhetoric is merely one aspect of the wider move to turn
the Internet into an echo chamber of establishment propaganda, drowning
out alternative voices to the benefit of large pharmaceutical
companies who make billions from selling risky vaccines and scientific
bodies whose very survival depends upon the global warming myth being
upheld.
It represents another effort to win an information war the establishment is currently losing, as Hillary Clinton herself admitted, by not just creating a new Orwellian Internet Ministry of Truth, as Bill Clinton demanded, but by ascribing this role to the very gatekeeper of the Internet itself – Google.
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.