Google is the world's biggest purveyor of Information. This is what could allow it to be the world's biggest censor. Is that the case? Strange things, to put it that way, have been happening with the Google-owned video platform, YouTube. The recent policy updates seem to have introduced more Censorship, with some, seemingly regular accounts being banned or locked out -- this was the case with the Canadian professor Jordan B. Peterson, for example.
Criticism of Google's policies
Harvard professor, Robert Epstein, famous for his criticism of Google's censorship, in a piece for usnews.com, writes: "When Google's employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, opinions and votes can shift, reputations can be ruined and businesses can crash and burn." Furthermore, in the same article, Mr.
Epstein argues that Google has, what he calls "blacklists". In fact, he mentions quite a few of them:
- The autocomplete blacklist - Words and phrases that are excluded from the Google's autocomplete feature (like you may already know, if you type in "crooked" -- the word "Hillary" will not appear as the auto-completed text).
- The Google Maps blacklist - Not all properties are visible on Google Maps. Your home probably is, but things like military installations are not.
- The YouTube blacklist - Google has been criticized for censoring right-leaning and conservative videos (to be more precise -- the videos that Google considers to be conservative or right wing), just like the ones created by the Canadian professor Jordan B. Peterson
- The Google account blacklist - Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Google+, these are just some of the few interconnected accounts Google owns. If you violate the ToS on any of them, you lose access to all of them.
- The Google News blacklist - Google is one of the largest news aggregators in the world, capable of tracking hundreds of thousands of news sources. This allows the company to engineer information as it pleases.
- The Google Adwords blacklist - Google has the power to blacklist any company that it does not like. In fact, it blacklisted an entire industry, the industry of payday loans, a few years ago. Interestingly, it did not blacklist a company called LendUp. Why? Because it is a major investor in it.
- The Google AdSense blacklist - Internet marketing forums are full of stories of disappointed website owners, people that have been banned right before they were about to cash out their earnings.
The dangers
Even if Professor Epstein's claims may seem to be too alarmist, the most important thing is this: Google has monopolized the internet.
Its search engine is the most used search engine in the world. Even if it hasn't fully monopolized information yet, Google has the power to do so. And that is frightening.
Governments and corporations are using the internet as a propaganda tool, our privacy is being invaded in countless ways, the internet is being taken away from the people. Soon enough, a lot of us might be forced to seek shelter in the abysses of the deep web.
