Google’s Latest “Fact-Checking” Announcement Is Disturbing

Google rolls out new fact-checking mechanism that appears to scrub out small, independent, or dissenting publishers.

August 21, 2023

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

I​’m not gonna lie: I really thought the response to all the Snowden, Assange, and Twitter revelations would’ve been much stronger, angrier, and vengeful.

Instead it’s rather flaccid.

People went right back to digging their heels into corporate narratives. It’s like the snow globe was shaken and all the flakes landed right back where they were. What were the odds?!

T​his is an incredible feature if it’s memory foam, or an elastic band. It’s really messed up if it’s a society. Significant events should compel us to change, and yet it doesn’t.

T​he UK is honestly bringing back face masks. There are still people halfheartedly wearing masks to grocery stores. I say halfhearted because they won’t pull them above their noses, or they reuse them and use them after dropping them on the floor. But they are still doing this.

T​here wasn’t much proof that they worked in the first place, but people stuck with it because the retraction on masks was so quiet.

T​hey are rolling out another vaccine for a different variant of covid. Many people who were trusting of the first round, dropped off after they saw the number of rounds required to keep up with it.

I don’t care THAT people wear masks or get vaccinated. I care why, and I care even more when that why metastasizes out of their heads and into public policy.

I​ recently saw a clip of Vivek Ramaswamy doing a podcast with a known liberal podcaster, David Pakman. The David said he wanted to start the interview by screening for sanity with one question.

Vivek chuckled and said, “I hope I pass!”

T​he David assured him, “You seem like someone who would pass this.”

H​e proceeds to ask him whether the thought the 2020 election was rigged.

Ramaswamy takes a moment and breaks down all the ways in which it might have been ranging from the mail in ballots to the machines. He dismissed those two things saying there’s no real way to know, so he can’t claim that to be the case.

T​he Pakman seemed relieved.

T​hen Vivek says, “But the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop was absolutely a form of election interference by our government.” And he goes on to explain how people polled would’ve voted differently had they known about it, and how the federal government and media were all aligned in suppressing that information.

F​air enough. While there’s no real data to suggest the machines and mail in ballots would’ve amounted to a difference in election outcome, there were actual polls done regarding the information about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Even if you don’t believe that would’ve been enough to affect the election, the mere fact that government agencies were colluding with private social media companies to suppress information should still be problematic.

Nope.

I have no horse in the game. Hell, I don’t even live in the US and I don’t vote. But that people are no longer bothered by surveillance, collusion, interference, or censorship is troubling. This is the behavior of fascistic governments. It’s not about the individuals they are targeting, it’s the motive behind targeting them in the first place.

I​f you recall, I flagged the targeting of James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas as well as the targeting of Matt Taibi. In both cases, members of the federal government tried to diminish their standing as members of “The Press”.

T​hey failed in doing that each time, but it is a common play in their handbook. We know this because the DoJ tried it again on someone by the name of John Crump. He writes for a small publication called AmmoLand News, and is a regular contributor to OAN Network (a small cable news network).

John Crump was reporting on a case involving the ATF (the US government) and two men, Matthew Hoover & Kristopher Ervin. Hoover and Ervin were convicted of conspiracy to transfer unregistered machine gun devices known as “Auto Key Cards.”

C​rump received a copy of the Presentencing Investigation Report from Matthew Hoover, and the DoJ sought to issue a gag order on Crump, and an order for him to destroy that material.

T​he only reason this went away is because Gun Owners of America intervened on Crump’s behalf.

“The Press” isn’t defined by how many times you’ve contributed an article, or how big the outlet is. The press doesn’t derive its legitimacy from metrics or subjective remarks from the DoJ.

So if they can’t silence these smaller outlets or individual reporters through harassment, then what’s left?

Glad you asked! Here’s the headline:

Google Announces Worldwide Ban on Independent Media From Search Results

Google has partnered with the UN, WHO and other globalist organizations in a new censorship tool, according to LaToya Drake, head of Google News Lab.

Google News Lab is “a team within the Google News Initiative whose mission is to collaborate with journalists to fight misinformation” and other things. And, the Google News Initiative (“GNI”) “works with publishers and journalists to fight misinformation.”

T​he layers of euphemisms in this are thick.

GNI doesn’t describe itself for what it is – the global internet censorship – instead Google describes it as “Fact Check Tools.”

T​his has to do with the evolution of Data Commons, which was launched in May of 2018. What is Data Commons?

Hosted by Google, Data Commons aggregates data from a wide range of sources into a unified database. It is a collection of data and tools which, broadly speaking, comprise a “knowledge graph” linking data from numerous open sources, supporting schemas, an API to access data in the graph, a graph browser, and a fact-check dataset.

By October 2018, Data Commons reported that the release of the sample dataset had stimulated further interest in the study of misinformation and that it had “received requests from academia to update the fact check corpus regularly and allow more publishers and non-technical users to add ClaimReview markups.” These requests were satisfied by the introduction of a suite of Google-based fact-check tools.

Basically, Google’s algorithms are designed to delete websites that criticise or question topics such as:

Proceed with care, folks. Catch phrases like “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “fact-checking” are conclusions YOU should be drawing for yourselves. Not some centralized database. Some unelected government bureaucrat and its media toadie aren’t going to give you the full scoop on anything.

I’m going to leave you with this.  Give it just the first minute.