Peak Internet — The Censorship Bubble Is About to Burst
June 6, 2020Over the past year, I’ve written extensively about the initially creeping — and then sweeping — censorship occurring online. Initially, the censorship vortex was on vaccines. Social media platforms and Google all started suppressing and then outright banning content raising questions about vaccine safety.
I warned everyone that this would eventually spread to other topics that might threaten a corporate bottom line. The only surprise was how quickly that happened. Within months, Google started shadow banning and hiding holistic health sites, including this one, in its search results.
In August 2019, I made the decision to leave Facebook due to its clear censoring of valid and truthful information. One year from the time social media platforms began censoring vaccine information, they all started banning views on COVID-19 treatments that differ from that of the World Health Organization.
The Dangerous Suppression of Freedom of Speech
YouTube’s CEO even went on the record stating they will block any video that goes against WHO guidance on the COVID-19 pandemic. Shockingly, this includes videos and articles by medical doctors, emergency care specialists and researchers who share their clinical experiences, recommendations and scientific findings.
Just one of countless examples was a May 17, 2020, Full Measure News report1 in which Sharyl Attkisson interviewed doctors reporting good results with hydroxychloroquine. The segment also looked at the potential financial motives driving the mass media’s disdain for the drug, while promoting remdesivir and as-of-yet-unavailable vaccines.
Just the News, which reported the takedown of Full Measure’s video, writes:2
“Dr. Jane Orient, the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons as well as a clinical lecturer at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, urged viewers to ‘look at the money’ when it comes to the two drugs.
‘There’s no big profits made in hydroxychloroquine,’ said Orient. ‘It’s very cheap, easy to manufacture, been around for 70 years. It’s generic.
Remdesivir is a new drug that could be very expensive and very lucrative if it’s ever approved. So I think we really do have to consider there’s some financial interest involved here’ …
‘These are organized efforts,’ [Attkisson] said, arguing that politically biased parties are behind efforts to remove or censor contrarian information on social media …
She noted recent efforts by Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to pressure social media companies to censor and downgrade ‘harmful’ coronavirus-related material and push users instead toward information from the World Health Organization. ‘I don’t know why we’re allowing this,’ Attkisson said. ‘Nobody appointed Adam Schiff to police our content on social media.'”
Joe Rogan Ditches YouTube
May 20, 2020, Infowars host Alex Jones revealed Joe Rogan has signed an exclusivity contract with Spotify for his Joe Rogan Experience Podcast. You can find the video here. Rogan had reportedly asked Jones to make the announcement.
According to Rogan, the move is his way to strike back against YouTube censorship. Granted, the $100 million paycheck from Spotify probably didn’t make it a particularly difficult decision. It also turned out to be a stroke of genius for Spotify, the stock of which jumped 8.4%, or more than $5 billion dollars, after Rogan announced the move on Twitter.3
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Jones was one of the first controversial figures to be banned from YouTube, which appears to be the reason he gave Jones the scoop. The straw that broke the camel’s back, Rogan says, was YouTube’s decision to block differing opinions on COVID-19, as he wanted to interview a variety of doctors and experts about it.
But even before the pandemic, Rogan had bristled against YouTube’s decision to demonetize or remove certain interviews. Rogan told Jones he sees YouTube’s behavior as “un-American” and “anti-human.” Jones wonders if Rogan’s move is symbolic of “peak internet.” Possibly, it’s a sign that the censorship bubble is about to burst.
Rogan Rules New Media Landscape
With 8.52 million subscribers as of May 27, 2020,4 Rogan is currently one of YouTube’s biggest channels. His departure is predicted by many to be a serious blow to YouTube’s bottom line. As noted by Bari Weiss in a New York Times op-ed,5 Rogan’s move matters because the media landscape is changing, and Rogan — and others like him — are “the news” now.
“The timing of Rogan’s rise and the Old Guard’s disintegration is not coincidental,” Weiss writes. “His success was made possible, at least in part, by legacy media’s blind spots.
While GQ puts Pharrell gowned in a yellow sleeping bag on the cover of its ‘new masculinity’ issue (introduced by the editor explaining that the men’s magazine ‘isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all’), Joe Rogan swings kettlebells and bow-hunts elk.
Men are hungry. He’s serving steak, rare. Condé Nast, GQ’s publisher, has laid off some 100 employees since the pandemic began. Meantime, ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ has 190 million downloads a month.
His success signals a profound shift, or several of them — a shift in what people want to talk about, how they want to hear it, and who they want to hear it from.”
Geopolitical blogger Tom Luongo comments on Rogan’s appeal, saying:6
“Rogan is an anomaly in podcasting, hell for that matter, all of media and gods bless him for it. Who else can get tens of millions of people to tune into him talking with someone for three hours? CNN can’t get people to watch them for five minutes in airports …
Rogan’s willingness to talk with and listen to anyone is his greatest asset. It is the key to his rise and his future success on Spotify, who desperately needs a big name to keep their business afloat.
Because in an age of endless spectacle and TV screens and websites crammed to the gills with graphics to distract you from the content, the simplicity of a conversation between two people who aren’t shouting at each other has become a welcome node of sanity …
Joe Rogan has now told the entire country that he’s had enough. And we needed someone like Joe to do this. That said, Rogan is only one half of the story, however. Because at the same time, one of these platforms needed to break away from the herd and welcome the dissenters.
For Spotify, Joe Rogan is the ‘killer app’ they needed to differentiate themselves as non-partisan and begin the exodus away from the big platforms who have become nothing but partisan.”
Spotify Censors Two of My Coronavirus Interviews
Whether Spotify will in fact live up to the expectation of non-bias remains to be seen. I for one have my doubts, as two of my coronavirus interviews have summarily been deleted off Spotify without recourse.
Spotify claims it only prohibits illegal content, hate content and infringing content. My interviews about coronavirus with Brian Hoyer and Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., clearly do not fall under any of these categories, yet Spotify removed them. So, so much for being a platform for uncensored expression. What’s worse, there is no way to dispute Spotify’s removal of these shows.
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Censorship Threatens Health, Democracy and Freedom
Like Rogan, I have taken my stand. I put up a firewall to prevent Google from indexing my pages, and I will never conform to “consensus reality” just to get my Google ranking back. It’s unfortunate, but the way it stands right now, we have to go old-school and share information we find valuable through word-of-mouth, by text, email and private message.
As for content on this site, we have built in simple sharing tools at the top of each article so you can easily email or text interesting articles to your friends and family.
My information is here because all of you support and share it, and we can do this without Big Tech’s support. In times like these, sharing information that is not readily available to all is nothing short of a revolutionary act.
Wherever and whenever possible, we must all fight against the oppression of censorship. Democracy hangs in the balance. Everyone must realize that without freedom of speech and opposing viewpoints, there can be no democracy. Instead, what you have is a totalitarian regime.
As it stands, that regime is not even made up of elected officials but unelected individuals representing for-profit multinational corporations. It’s time to break free. To do that, consider these suggestions:
Become a subscriber to my newsletter and encourage your friends and family to do the same. This is the easiest and safest way to make sure you’ll stay up to date on important health and environmental issues.
If you have any friends or relatives who are seriously interested in their health, please share important articles with them and encourage them to subscribe to our newsletter.
Consider dumping any Android phone the next time you get a phone. Android is a Google operating system and will seek to gather as much data as they can about you for their benefit.
Use the internal Mercola.com search engine when searching for articles on my site.
Boycott Google by avoiding any and all Google products:
•Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include Qwant and Swisscows
•Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave or Opera browser instead, available for all computers and mobile devices.7 From a security perspective, Opera is far superior to Chrome and offers a free VPN service (virtual private network) to further preserve your privacy
•If you have a Gmail account, try a non-Google email service such as ProtonMail,8 an encrypted email service based in Switzerland
•Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives9
•If you’re a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts
Sign the “Don’t be evil” petition created by Citizens Against Monopoly
Sources and References
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