Commentary

What if I told you that social media platforms are manipulating you, steering you toward health information that they think is right, rather than letting you evaluate content for yourself?

Accredited professionals, meanwhile, who stand for health freedom and who criticize Big Anything, are losing posting privileges, getting banned or buried, finding themselves deranked, and getting digitally assassinated.

Content is literally disappearing from the internet along with our health choices.

It sounds conspiratorial because it is. Independent journalists and health experts are blowing the whistle. But it’s become a silent one.

(Courtesy Zach Vorhies)

“The censorship that is being applied to alternative health is nothing less than demonic,” said Zach Vorhies, 39, who worked as a Google software engineer for 8 1/2 years before coming out as a whistleblower. “That may seem extreme, but I’ve been following the happenings in the new cures that are being suppressed.”

According to Vorhies, in the past three years, Google has rolled out changes that purposely down-rank independent health websites, even extremely high-quality and independent medical articles that are written by credentialed health care professionals.

“At the same time, establishment, big corporate pharma websites like WebMD are monopolizing the first page of results,” said Vorhies.

“What’s terrifying is that many of these establishment medical articles landing on the first page do not even have a stated author and make assertions that are contradicted by science.”

Consider that “people use Google to search for about 1 billion health questions a day,” author and health professional Joe Cohen says. “Eighty percent of internet users have searched for a health-related topic online, according to a recent study.”

High-quality online health sites that have been negatively affected include GreenMedInfo, Dr. Axe, Erin Elizabeth of Health Nut News, SelfHacked, Dr. Joseph Mercola, and HoneyColony (my website).

Censorship and freedom of speech vis-à-vis politics is being discussed, but no one in the mainstream media is covering the effect on the health space.

As Vorhies reminds us, Google’s stated mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. “But in the past three years, it has betrayed those values by intervening in the search algorithm to tunnel users toward big corporate establishment players,” he said.

In late June 2019, Project Veritas—with the assistance of Vorhies—proved that Google is indeed manipulating search results, filtering content, and dubbing information as news based on Google’s agenda. Vorhies released 950 pages that insinuate that the search engine secretly boosts or condemns content on a platform that was supposedly neutral.

A document titled “News Blacklist Site for Google Now” singles out nearly 500 websites to be hidden from users of Google Now, an Android application that was phased out in 2016 and replaced by the Google Feed.

Natural Remedies Heist: A Long Time Cometh

The stifling of natural remedies in favor of peddling pharmaceuticals and monetizing medicine isn’t new. We gave our health over to the faux faith of maligned science and technology ages ago, back in 1910, when a teacher—not a doctor—wrote the so-called Flexner Report. Since World War II, the pharmaceutical industry has steadily netted increasing profits to become the world’s second-largest manufacturing industry after war toys.

Over 100 years ago, the powers-that-be created a gatekeeper who would help “influence legislative bodies on state and federal levels to create regulations and licensing ‘red tape’ that strictly promoted drug medicine, while stifling and shutting down alternative, inexpensive natural remedies,” according to health journalist S.D. Wells.

What is new and novel is that now Big Tech is collaborating with Big Pharma to suppress free speech. As if Big Pharma doesn’t do enough harm, Big Tech is harnessing their power to modify search algorithms to align and appease an arguably sick agenda, in the name of the supposed safety and protection of the public.

Jason Erickson, a writer for NaturalBlaze.com, wrote:

“Evidently, the fact that a level playing field of information—which is exactly what the Internet was promised to be—is skewing toward anti-vaccination (and other holistic healing) must be worrying to those who rely on the financial support of Big Pharma and establishment medicine.”

Consider that alternative medicine empowers the patient and that the supplement industry is a $32.5 billion business, according to the Nutrition Business Journal.

Google’s Hocus Pocus Predictions

Google’s latest trick? Autosuggestions. It’s bad enough that Google is effectively scrubbing previously high-ranking sites from their search results. Now they are actually “suggesting” what you should search for.

Here’s Google’s official statement:

“Autocomplete is designed to help people complete a search they were intending to do, not to suggest new types of searches to be performed. These are our best predictions of the query you were likely to continue entering.”

From a psychological point of view, autosuggestions are arguably the simplest yet strongest tool for mind control. Incredulously, Google states that the autosuggestions are actually “predictions,” not “suggestions.”

Tsk, tsk, Google, who made you resident psychic?

For instance, when I searched for “supplements are …” on Sept. 1, the suggestions were “bad,” “useless,” “not regulated,” and so on. In the past few weeks, Google has peppered in some positive keywords: “amazing” and “healthy.”

Screenshot of Google autocomplete suggestions for a search for “supplements are …” on Sept. 1, 2019. (Screenshot via Maryam Henein)

Screenshot of Google autocomplete suggestions for a search for “supplements are …” on Sept. 17, 2019. (Screenshot via Maryam Henein)

Sayer Ji, founder of GreenMedInfo, a reputable health site, writes:

“Google is auto-completing the search fields of billions of users with false information (topics ranging from natural health to candidates for election), based not on objective search volume data, but on an extremely biased political and socio-economic agenda—one that is jeopardizing the health and human rights of everyone on the planet.”

The articles we publish at HoneyColony.com all reference studies published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature—the commonly recognized gold standard for research. But that doesn’t matter now that Big Pharma propaganda is disseminated via Google.

Don’t believe you are being bamboozled? View the disparities in volume yourself by going to Google Trends. Compare the actual search volume with Google’s amazing new “predictions” feature.

These actions trump the principles of truth and justice. It’s called social engineering. Human experimentation, even. What it isn’t is a search engine synonymous with looking for and finding objective answers. The Project Veritas video was promptly removed by YouTube (owned by Google) and then by Vimeo.

Technofascism Explained

Many of these acts can be classified as “technofascist.”

Four years ago, Chet Bowers, a now-deceased author, lecturer, and environmental activist, described technofascism as “an increased reliance upon computer-mediated learning at all levels of education [to spur] conformity of thinking.”

As Bowers put it, the populace assumes they are being given accurate information and over time are only able to digest short explanations. In addition to conformity, fascism necessitates “the loss of historical memory and a perceived crisis or endpoint that requires the collective energy and loyalty of the young and old.”

The internet has certainly “shorten[ed] people’s attention spans to the point where slogans and sound bites conveniently serve as the basis of political decision-making.”

“Masking disinformation as models of factual accuracy and objective reporting,” the prevalence of disinformation and fake news facilitates the ability to condition “millions of Americans to accept ideologically driven propaganda, which further reduces the likelihood of mass resistance to the techno-fascist agenda,” he wrote.

“While the moral foundations of techno-fascism align with the values of market capitalism and the progress-oriented ideology of science that easily slips into scientism, its level of efficiency and totalitarian potential can easily lead to repressive systems that will not tolerate dissent, especially on the part of those challenging how the colonizing nature of techno-fascism promotes consumerism that is destroying the environment and alternative cultural lifestyles such as the cultural commons.”

It’s 2019. Or wait, is it “Nineteen Eighty-Four”?

Social media platforms—toxins for the mind and intellect—now feed the masses processed manufactured information while omitting or fudging whatever doesn’t jive with Big Health Care, aka Sick Care.

The future is now. The zombies are here.

We’re being reduced to robots obsessively gazing at blue-lit screens, like in a twisted version of the Greek myth of Narcissus, in which we never recognize who we truly are: a magnificent species worthy of complete health and vitality. But alas, in this rendition, we’re too busy engaging in palatable online vitriol and trollism and ingesting toxic lies.

Instead of debating the subjects at hand with civilized decorum, we’re being polarized and we’re engaging in red herrings and ad hominem attacks. For instance, you begin talking about the negative impacts of 5G and someone on social media calls you a tin hat-wearing loon and discredits you, instead of focusing on all the experts that have spoken up and shared scientific evidence against this technology.

In this balkanization, we become part of sub-tribes, making it easier for corporations and government to manage and manipulate us.

Smoke and mirrors. Cloak and daggers. Crowd control.

All sickness. No health.

#GoogleExposed During Decade of Vaccines

In 2006, Google became so popular that the Oxford English Dictionary officially turned the company into a verb. Their role, we hoped, was not to take sides on a debate but to give the world access to information on an unprecedented scale. Knowledge is power.

Thirteen years later, Google is no longer an unbiased platform; they’re a publisher with an agenda. And they’re not only the most powerful search engine, they’re also a drug company. Google is a beautifully crafted Trojan horse for Big Pharma.

Simply put, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, owns pharmaceutical subsidiaries. In 2013, Google founded Calico. Calico’s mission is to understand the biology that controls lifespan and to treat age-related diseases. Two years later, Alphabet founded Verily Life Sciences (previously Google Life Sciences). Both pharma companies are partnering with others and having babies of their own.

Verily joined forces with the European pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s leading vaccine manufacturers. They formed a new drug company, Galvani Bioelectronics.

In January 2019, BusinessWire reported that Mary Ellen Coe, Google’s president of customer solutions, was joining the board of directors at Merck, another huge vaccine producer.

But the real clincher is that GV, the venture capital arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has also invested in Vaccitech—a company described as “the future of mass vaccine production.”

Founded by scientists at Oxford University, Vaccitech’s end goal is to develop a vaccine that would be the first in the world to fight all types of flu.

If all goes well, Vaccitech’s shot could potentially be ready for rollout in 2023. The potential development—“a so-called universal flu vaccine that elicits immunity against parts of the virus that do not change from year to year”—has been described as a “Holy Grail.”

“The Vaccitech trial marks the first time a universal flu vaccine has progressed beyond phase one clinical testing,” wrote The Independent.

Yet to others, a one-size-fits-all flu shot sounds like a disastrous future on several levels. According to a 2018 Department of Justice report, the annual flu shot is the most dangerous vaccine in the United States.

This invention doesn’t take into account or respect biodiversity. Not every body system reacts to “medicine” in the same way. Not to mention that we are sovereign humans; we should be able to choose what we do with our bodies, not be forced to subject ourselves to questionable medicine.

Is it just coincidence that vaccine safety has become so maligned in the media as of late? We’re being divided by design. People are being ostracized like never before for merely questioning alternative views. It’s to pave the way for what is coming—mandatory vaccines, not only for children, but for adults, too.

Vaccines are a billion-dollar business. In 2012 alone, the world’s 11 top pharmaceutical companies generated $700 billion-plus in profits on vaccines.

Stated another way, Google and Friends stand to earn a lot of money from vaccinating whomever they can stick a needle into, multiple times over. And letting people have access to valid questions about vaccine safety might damage their bottom line.

Commenting on the U.S.’s National Vaccine Plan, Dr. Sherri J. Tenpenny, wrote:

“It lays bare the incestuous public-private relationship between the pharmaceutical vaccine manufacturers, the U.S. government and the World Health Rulers.”

Furthermore, “the objectives in ‘Healthy People 2020’ represent the massive expansion of a nanny-state government, intent on taking over every area of a person’s life and eliminating health choices,” Tenpenny added.

Did you know that partners from all over the world came together with a global commitment to vaccination, declaring 2010–2020 the “Decade of Vaccines?” Meanwhile, in January 2019, the World Health Organization—in perfect timing—stressed the importance of getting your child vaccinated to protect them, and others, from deadly diseases. Not doing so poses a “global threat.”

Check, please.

How about the $4 billion-plus paid out to those who have been affected by vaccine injuries? The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was started as a result of a law passed in 1986, giving pharmaceutical companies total legal immunity from being sued due to injuries and deaths resulting from vaccines, according to Health Impact News.

Said another way, Big Pharma can create as many shots as they want, with no accountability involved. It’s a liability-free market.

Given what’s in the pipeline, isn’t it a bit odd that simply engaging in an educated conversation/exploration, or presenting opposing evidence, results in being 86’d from the internet? Oftentimes, opposers don’t have informed arguments, nor are they scientifically literate. And if you use intuition on what’s best for your own body? Fuhgeddaboutit.

One health influencer I spoke to pointed out that other platforms such as Vimeo and MailChimp are also helping to shut down the discussion.

In early July, Vimeo announced that it will no longer publish sites critical of vaccines, or sites that question vaccine safety.

Facebook, whose committee members include former Big Pharma employees, has also censored legitimate scientific inquiry and debate regarding vaccine safety.

No matter what your view is on vaccines, the point I’m illustrating here is that Big Pharma’s tentacles—full of suction and sway—now extend to Big Tech, and that prohibiting the sharing of (health) information—a tenet of the internet—is wrong. Unless you do not believe in the First Amendment.

If you bother to look, the conflicts of interest are obvious. Google has a clear agenda that serves pharmaceuticals, and its success is now directly built into its search algorithms.

Google Now Processed and Non-Organic

Back in the good ole days, organic search results closely matched the user’s search query. The algorithm was based on relevance and popularity unless you paid Google extra to get listed on top as an obvious ad.

Until recently, popular search terms helped connect Googlers with the information they were actually looking for. This, in turn, spurred writers to pivot and employ search engine optimization—such as keywords—when crafting content online.

By June 2016, our online magazine and marketplace HoneyColony—whose mission is to empower you to be your own health advocate—was getting about 500,000 unique visitors a month, according to Google Analytics. We were genuinely and organically garnering interest and offering value with solid well-researched articles.

Until we weren’t.

A screenshot of Google Analytics showing traffic to website HoneyColony.com. (Screenshot via Maryam Henein)

What happened? Google changed its algorithms.

Updates on Google aren’t new. The company has gone through thousands of updates throughout its existence. And every once in a while, it rolls out a major algorithmic update. But until now, there’s been nothing as sinister as the recent changes, which apparently are powerful enough to do serious damage to a health-oriented site’s revenue, alongside the site’s organic traffic. Especially if Google doesn’t agree with what they’re saying.

In the past, Google claimed their updates were actually beneficial to pages that weren’t getting as many views. But it’s becoming clear that Google has other aims—to control what information is most accessible to searchers.

In August 2018, traffic to HoneyColony.com dwindled 30 percent. We proverbially scratched our heads during marketing meetings, wondering what we were doing wrong, based on Google’s standards. And then, we learned we had been affected by what would be referred to as the “Medic Update.”

According to Search Engine Land, the focus of the changes made under the “Medic Update” centered around the medical and health space, as well as the areas referred to as “Your Money Your Life,” defined by Google as “types of pages [that] could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety [of users].”

When asked how to ensure sites don’t lose traffic, a Google employee named John Mueller said in a Webmaster Hangout, “There is no specific thing, where we’d be able to say, ‘You did this and you should have done that and therefore, we’re showing things differently.’”

This kind of vagueness and evasiveness is something I’ve encountered when interviewing government or big corporate lackeys who excel in the language of gobbledygook (or in this case, Googlygook) and speak from preapproved PR texts.

Google claims that sites can improve their rankings by improving their “EAT”—expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. But what criteria are they using to decide these?

Joe Cohen of the reputable and detailed site SelfHacked, another site that has seen its traffic plummet, says: “The thing is, no matter who I ask, they’ve all told me that SelfHacked is already authoritative, trustworthy, and displays expertise. You can look at any of our posts and judge for yourself.”

We’re witnessing a slow, sneaky purge, where crowdsource relevance is now seemingly irrelevant. The definition of what constitutes credible has drastically changed.

Then, in June 2019, Google rolled out yet another algorithmic change.

Sites impacted in previous core updates were once again affected. “On average, the impact was smaller than the August ‘Medic’ update,” as measured by MozCast.

While one source says the impact was smaller than the August Medic update, many would disagree. “Devastating” may be a more appropriate word than “smaller,” depending on if you’ve personally experienced content go from Page 1 of a Google search to being buried on Page 6.

(Screenshot via Maryam Henein)

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth,” said George Orwell in “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

The new updates make it so searchers have to know the site name to find us. Unless you add “HoneyColony.com” or “Mercola.com” to a key term, you won’t find the content our sites publish.

“Even skipping ‘.com’ will minimize your search results,” wrote Mercola, whose Google search results had been topping the charts organically for years. Since these updates, Mercola’s site traffic has been slashed by about 99 percent.

Shadow-banned. Ostensibly scrubbed.

Google used to rank pages based on whether an author could prove his/her expertise, on how many people visited a page, or on the number of other reputable sites that linked to that page. How about when an author has a degree? Doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Google now buries expert views if they’re deemed “harmful” to the public, explains The SEM Post:

“There has been a lot of talk about author expertise when it comes to the quality rater guidelines. … This section has been changed substantially. … If the purpose of the page is harmful, then expertise doesn’t matter. It should be rated Lowest!”

But who decides? What qualifications do Google quality-checkers possess? Who is deciding what’s harmful?

Who exactly defines “fake news” at Google? According to Vorhies, “If one was expecting an open and transparent group then they would be wrong: It turns out it’s the hyper-partisan left-wing group Media Matters.”

Given this, what do we do with a search engine we’ve taken for granted and trusted a bit too much? The cyber realm is sadly no longer the place to look for valid information.

Consider that in his book “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Orwell describes how history and facts are recalled and rewritten again and again, invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Journalists have witnessed information go missing before their eyes while doing research. I now use different search engines to conduct research and often find opposing narratives.

No Money in Cures

One in every two Americans today suffers from a chronic illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Americans pop more pills than anywhere else in the world.

“In 2016, over 4.5 billion prescriptions were filled, earning the pharmaceutical industry more than $200 billion,” according to an article by Richard Gale and Gary Null published by the Centre for Research on Globalization, an independent research and media organization.

Yet we’re still the sickest country on the planet. And all these drugs are often just adding to the problem. According to a 2011 report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, in that same year, drugs were associated with 2 million to 4 million people in the United States experiencing serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.

Meanwhile, the United States also ranks pretty low when it comes to life expectancy. In 2019, the United States will spend about “$3.5 trillion on health care, in addition to a $1.5 trillion loss in work and wages due to illness,” according to Gale and Null.

What’s fascinating is that prescription medicines such as xannys and SSRIs are a part of American culture, woven into narratives, songs, movies, and casual conversation. We’ve come to accept these as part of everyday normal life—what social psychologist Erich Fromm would have described as a “socially patterned defect.”

So let’s put things into perspective. Opioid crisis. Antibiotic-resistance epidemic. Grotesque obesity stats. Rising rates of metabolic syndrome. Skyrocketing autoimmune conditions.

According to The New York Times, cities are even “suing major drugstore chains and Walmart, contending they distributed billions of painkillers that devastated communities.”

To heck with the Hippocratic Oath of do no harm; profits trump the long-term care of patients.

Gale and Null write, “Instead of making efforts to fund disease prevention and educate the public, prevention has been abandoned altogether.”

There is no money in cures. Management of symptoms is what keeps Big Pharma in business. Curing patients isn’t a sustainable business model.

With all these facts laid out, can we safely say—both figuratively and literally—that Western medicine may not have all the answers? It’s no wonder so many are going elsewhere for answers. Sectors such as nutrition, preventative medicine, and personalized holistic health have grown by leaps and bounds. In 2016, alternative medicine industry revenue was estimated to be at about $14.3 billion in the United States. (Of course, this industry also has its own host of issues.)

Congress, Corruption, and Censorship

What is the U.S. government—federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—doing about all this, you may ask? While some politicians, even presidential candidates, have spoken out against Big Pharma and the lack of proper oversight, it’s all ultimately useless. Big Pharma doesn’t just own Google. It owns Congress, too.

Dr. Raeford Brown, a pediatric anesthesia specialist at the UK Kentucky Children’s Hospital and chair of the FDA Committee on Analgesics and Anesthetics, told Yahoo Finance:

“The pharmaceutical industry pours millions of dollars into the legislative branch every single year. In 2016, they put $100 million into the elections. That’s a ton of money.”

As one reporter wrote in The Guardian, “Drug money is coursing through the veins of Congress.”

Overall, Congress gets paid to grant Big Pharma carte blanche. The billions of lobbying dollars Big Pharma has spent over the years, and the different lobby groups involved, is enough to make a woke person nauseous.

Lobbying is how big business controls the government. Big Tech is now spending millions on lobbyists (paid persuaders), too, joining the top “usual suspects,” which predominantly includes Big Pharma.

“With Amazon spending $4.2 million, Facebook shelling out $4.1 million and Google chipping in $3.2 million on second-quarter lobbying, this marks the first time all three companies ranked among the top 15 lobbying spenders in a single quarter,” wrote Open Secrets.

Currently, tech companies such as Google are “indemnified against lawsuits for manipulating content on their platform under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996,” says GreenMedInfo’s Sayer Ji. “Until this act is repealed, [tech companies] will continue to operate with impunity, essentially above the law.”

Not all politicians are blinded. In June, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced Senate Bill 1914, a bill “to amend the Communications Decency Act to encourage providers of interactive computer services to provide content moderation that is politically neutral.”

The bill is referred to as the “Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act.” Per traditional process, it will next be considered by committee before possibly being sent on to the House or Senate for a vote. But according to SkoposLabs, the bill has only a 2 percent chance of being enacted.

Meanwhile, on Sept. 9, most U.S. states and territories officially announced an antitrust investigation of Google (rather than an actual lawsuit).

Tony Romm reported in The Washington Post that the probe’s initial focus is online advertising. “Google is expected to rake in more than $48 billion in U.S. digital ad revenue this year, far rivaling its peers, while capturing 75 percent of all spending on U.S. search ads, according to eMarketer,” he wrote.

It was a few months earlier that the House Antitrust Subcommittee launched a bipartisan investigation into “competition in digital markets.”

In an earlier statement, Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) said:

“The growth of monopoly power across our economy is one of the most pressing economic and political challenges we face today. Market power in digital markets presents a whole new set of dangers. After four decades of weak antitrust enforcement and judicial hostility to antitrust cases, it is critical that Congress step in to determine whether existing laws are adequate to tackle abusive conduct by platform gatekeepers or whether we need new legislation to respond to this challenge.” (Involving government in online policing merits its own story.)

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice announced in late July that it’s launching an antitrust probe into online platforms. (Given the agency’s track record of allowing perverse unjust mergers, I wouldn’t hold my breath.)

What is happening is that social media platforms are getting fined. But so what? Facebook was just hit with a record $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission and a $100 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission, in late July. The EU, meanwhile, has fined Google billions of dollars on four separate occasions in recent years for violations of European monopoly policies.

Fines are paltry in comparison to the power being gained and the profits that Big Tech/Pharma/Government/Elites stand to make. Can we expect any real accountability, given Big Tech is sleeping with all-powerful Big Pharma?

The politicians who drink the Big Pharma KoolAid or have ties with Big Pharma are making arguments that social media and the openness of information is causing harm and are therefore contributing to making the problem worse, not better.

In a recent letter to Google and Facebook, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote:

“There is strong evidence to suggest that at least part of the source of this trend [of vaccine hesitancy] is the degree to which medically inaccurate information about vaccines surface on the websites where many Americans get their information.”

What is this “strong evidence”? Why not let the people decide and allow veritable independent journalists to do their job, offering accessibility to independent studies?

Schiff, who audaciously and wrongfully has stated that “there is no evidence that vaccines cause life-threatening or disabling diseases,” writes:

“The algorithms which power these services are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information, and the consequences of that are particularly troubling for public health issues.”

Yet who decides what is “misinformation”? Big Pharma? This cuts both ways, or at least, it used to. Instead, Big Tech is taking an unequivocal stance on what constitutes health freedom and safety, blaming the openness of social media as the reason for a measles outbreak. Puhleeze. This fake narrative is manufactured to push an agenda that involves pills and needles, while smearing credible people, hiding information, and vaporizing sovereignty.

“Google is playing both sides of the game,” Vorhies told Project Veritas. “On the one hand, they’re saying they are a platform and that they are immune from being sued for the content that they host on their website. On the other hand, they’re acting as a publisher, in which they’re determining the editorial agenda of these certain companies, and they are applying that. If people don’t fall in line with their editorial agenda, then their news articles get deboosted and deranked. And if people do fall in line with their editorial agenda, it gets boosted and pushed to the top.”

Most people don’t understand the power of Google in their lives, nor do they have any idea that Google has rolled out impactful updates and has more in the works. But when I ask, I get a, “Yeah, you know what, I did kind of notice something was different about Google.”

And then there is the glut of fake news confusing the public. Take, for instance, this quote on ThinkProgress concerning evidence of Google’s preferential leanings:

“What appears to be happening is that some conservatives are massively distorting tech companies’ attempts to protect against foreign election interference or restrict the distribution of hateful views, stirring up conspiracy theories that the companies are demonstrating blanket bias against conservatives.”

Nonsense. Don’t believe that the algorithmic changes are being made only to protect you from another “rigged” election or to save you from four more years of Trump. And don’t believe that tech companies haven’t been allowed to cross a line. This is a perfect example of both a red herring and a false narrative.

Wikipedia: Online Encyclopedia or Google Sidekick?

Not long ago, Wikipedia regularly had a banner splashed on their homepage, hitting up online visitors for money to stay in business. Then, Google invested $3.1 million into Wikipedia, bringing Google’s total contribution to $7.5 million.

Wikipedia is now Google’s obedient sidekick. As journalist Louise Matsakis wrote in Wired:

“The decision isn’t altruistic. … The company also has used Wikipedia articles to train machine-learning algorithms, as well as fight misinformation on YouTube.”

Google now ranks Wikipedia in many searches as a totally legitimate encyclopedia, even though it’s an open-source site that has been described as an “often untrustworthy source of information.” On Wikipedia, users can update entries in real-time, without any formal peer review or editorial process. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger himself described it as a “broken system.”

According to Gale and Null:

“Content about medical products and therapeutic regimes are penned by completely unqualified editors with no medical background. … Yet Wikipedia editors state with authority that there are no proven health benefits in non-conventional and natural medical therapies.”

Given that their employers are part of Big Pharma, can we really believe them?

Google’s algorithms are giving better rankings to content from a bunch of anonymous, unvetted contributors over independent journalists educated in functional medicine who inspire conversation, question assumptions, challenge the status quo, and encourage curiosity. But we’re the castaways?

In truth, there exist tons of studies and articles demonstrating the efficacy of complementary and alternative medicine. Many independent board-certified physicians and functional medicine practitioners utilize them in their practices with excellent results.

Take for example Dr. Joseph Mercola, an actual board-certified D.O. and respected author whose website predates Google. He has written hundreds of valid articles and has been an inspiration to millions. But now, many will never know his contributions, because, he says, “Google is now manually lowering the ranking of undesirable content, based on Wikipedia’s assessment of the author or site.”

Below is what you’ll find if you search for Joseph Mercola. Go ahead, kids, try it at home.

(Screenshot via Maryam Henein)

“Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again,” states “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Technofascist Future: Will We Resist?

In the book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us And Them,” Jason Stanley writes, “Shouldn’t liberal democracy promote a full airing of all possibilities, even the false and bizarre ones, because the truth will eventually prevail in the marketplace of ideas?”

I’m only scratching the surface of this well spun-out (worldwide) web.

You likely have never heard of me, even though I’ve directed an award-winning documentary about honeybees and colony collapse disorder. And now my chances of penetrating the mainstream have been compromised.

If I’m a mere worker bee, not worthy of high rankings, why have I been banned for life from PayPal, scrubbed off Kiva and GoFundme, had the company’s Facebook ads temporarily shut down on several occasions, had videos removed from YouTube, and been buried by Google? In truth, I can write a whole series or book about technofascist acts in the health and wellness space.

Just recently, I learned that Care2.com, a site that connects people with causes, is closing down its “Healthy Living and Causes” sections “as the company sharpens its focus on advocacy work and nonprofit partners.” What does that really mean? Not only are they shutting down the section, but they are also removing all their articles. Dozens of my articles. Poof. Vaporized. Gone.

Coincidental? Unlikely.

As Mercola writes:

“Big Tech has joined the movement, bringing in a global concentration of wealth to eliminate competition and critical voices—voices that bring awareness to the frightening future as our rights, freedoms, and competition erode into a fascist sunset, all disguised as a means to protect you from ‘misinformation.’”

Bowers asks:

“The most critical question is whether there will be resistance to how everyday lives are being increasingly monitored, motivated to pursue the increasingly narrow economic agenda of the emerging techno-fascist culture and stripped of historical values and identity.”

Will we stand up for rights for health freedom and sovereignty? Or sit back and play with our phones, oblivious that we are losing our rights and having a say in what happens to our bodies?

“Anytime you are truly free, there is a cost to pay,” Dr. Cornel West recently told Joe Rogan.

I agree. But the alternative is ghastly. Perhaps, as Stanley says, we need to look to John Stuart Mill, who defended the importance of free speech in his 1859 work “On Liberty”:

“To silence a false opinion is wrong because knowledge arises only from the ‘collision [of truth] with error.’ In other words, true belief becomes knowledge only by emerging victorious from the din of argument and disagreement and discussion,” Stanley wrote.

“According to Mill, knowledge emerges only as a result of deliberation with opposing positions, which must occur either with actual opponents or through internal dialogue. Without this process, even true belief remains mere ‘prejudice.’ We must allow all speech, even defense of false claims and conspiracy theories, because it is only then that we have a chance of achieving knowledge.”

I believe we don’t have to be slaves to Big Brother. If this message finds you, muster the courage to speak out and share. Use search engines such as Qwant. Stand for your sovereignty and health freedom.

The revolution is underway.

“We have to let people know that if Google is going to censor us, let’s censor them. And we can,” said Vorhies. “Together we are going to confront Google; were going to hold them to their own standards and justice will come because we the people will decide that’s what needs to happen.”

Maryam Henein is an investigative journalist, functional medicine consultant, and founder and editor-in-chief of HoneyColony. She is also the director of the award-winning documentary film “Vanishing of the Bees,” narrated by Ellen Page. Follow her on Twitter @maryamhenein