Over the years, the government and business
monopolies, including the likes of Big Tech, have formed a global alliance
hell-bent on protecting and concentrating member profits. The price for keeping
business going as usual is personal liberty and freedom of speech that may
impact these fascist government-industrial complexes.
The major industries colluding to take over
the government and government agencies include banking, military, agriculture,
pharma, media and Big Tech.
The leaders of these industries have
organized strategies to buy off politicians through lobbying and to capture
regulatory agencies through revolving door hiring strategies and paid-for media
influence through advertising dollars.
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.”
Against the State: An ...Llewellyn
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This year, we’ve seen an
unprecedented push to implement censorship across all online platforms, making
it increasingly difficult to obtain and share crucial information about health
topics. If you’ve been having difficulty finding articles from my website in
your Google searchers of late, you’re not alone.
Google traffic to Mercola.com has plummeted by about 99% over the past
few weeks. The reason? Google’s June 2019 broad core update, which took effect June 3,1 removed
most Mercola.com pages from its search results. As reported by Telaposts.com:2
“The
June 2019 Google Broad Core Algorithm Update impacted the rankings of websites
in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages. Several aspects of the algorithm were
changed which caused some sites to gain visibility and others to lose
visibility.
Generally
speaking, sites negatively impacted will see a drop in rankings for many or all
of important keywords or key phrases which they used to rank well for … The
June 2019 Google Broad Core Algorithm Update impacted sites across the web,
however, I am personally seeing the most impact on News and Health sites.”
Mercola.com targeted in
Google’s latest core algorithm update
Now,
any time you enter a health-related search word into Google, such as “heart
disease” or “Type 2 diabetes,” you will not find Mercola.com articles in the
search results. The only way to locate any of my articles at this point is by
searching for “Mercola.com heart disease,” or “Mercola.com Type 2 diabetes.”
Even
skipping the “.com” will minimize your search results, and oftentimes the only
pages you’ll get are blogs, not my full peer-reviewed articles. Negative press
by skeptics has also been upgraded, which means if you simply type in my name
none of my articles will come but what you will find are a deluge of negative
articles voicing critiques against me in your searches. Try entering my name in
Yahoo or Bing and you will see completely different results.
As explained by Telapost,3 a
core update “is when Google makes several changes to their main (core)
algorithm.” In the past, Google search results were based on crowdsource
relevance. An article would ascend in rank based on the number of people who
clicked on it.
Traditionally,
if you produced unique and high-quality content that matched what people were
looking for, you were rewarded by ranking in the top of search results. You
would find Mercola.com near the top of nearly any health search results.
So, let’s say one of my
articles on diabetes was seventh on the page for your
search; if more people clicked on that link than, say, an article listed in
third or fifth place, my article would move up in rank. In a nutshell, Google
search results were, at least in part, based on popularity.
That’s
no longer the case. Instead, Google is now manually lowering the ranking of
undesirable content, largely based on Wikipedia’s assessment of the author or
site.
Wikipedia’s
founder and anonymous editors are well-known to have extreme bias against
natural health content and authors. Google also contributes heavily to funding
Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is near the top of nearly all searches — despite the
anonymous aspect of contributors. Who better to trust than a bunch of unknown,
unqualified contributors?
Wikipedia’s co-founder even
admits these bad actors have made it a “broken system.”4 Why
would Google give such credibility to a platform that even its own founder says
is broken and overrun with bad actors?
Google’s new quality rater guidelines are a death knell for experts whose
views threaten industry profits
Another major change was
Google’s 2019 quality rater guidelines,5,6 released
May 16. What are these guidelines? As explained by Telapost:7
“Google
hires ‘quality raters,’ people who visit websites and evaluate their quality.
Their feedback doesn’t directly impact your site; it goes to engineers who
update the Google algorithm in an effort to display great websites to their
users. The guidelines give us great insight as to what Google considers a
quality web page.”
One significant change:
Google now buries expert views if they’re deemed “harmful” to the public. As
explained by The SEM post:8
“There
has been a lot of talk about author expertise when it comes to the quality
rater guidelines … This section has been changed substantially … [I]f the
purpose of the page is harmful, then expertise doesn’t matter. It should be
rated Lowest!”
Google
used to rank pages based on whether an author could prove their expertise based
on how many people visited a page or the number of other reputable sites that
linked to that page. No more.
As
you may have noticed, we’ve stayed on top of this, even creating a peer review
panel of medical and scientific experts that review, edit and approve most
articles before they’re published. This is in addition to my own medical
expertise as a board-certified physician.
My
articles are also fully referenced, most containing dozens of references to
studies published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Alas, none of
this now matters, as the very fact that the information I present typically
contradicts industry propaganda places me in the lowest possible rating
category.
Bait and switch
Different
perspectives are essential to a healthy debate of ideas. When our voices are
censored humanity loses and fascism wins. Pinterest has banned me, Google has
mostly erased my information and many others are experiencing this same
censorship. What makes me so dangerous to these industries that they need to
censor me from those looking for my information?
Google
had the brilliant idea of utilizing crowd sourcing, providing the best answers
to your questions by pushing the most frequently selected content to the top of
the search results — a truly democratic system to reward people for sharing
information, and helping you locate this information by essentially sharing the
most popular, highest quality content.
My
information was frequently at the top of many health searches, because many
people like you found it to be the most valuable. But as Google’s power grew to
enormous proportions, the goal of providing this service to you changed. The
goal now is to become even more powerful by uniting with other powerful
industries and government to force their beliefs on the masses and manipulate
the future itself.
Crowd sourcing has become crowd control.
Google began by giving you everything you want so it can now take everything
you have. Google has changed from looking at users as customers and giving them
what they want, to making users custodians of their will — essentially making
you a host of a virus to carry out their agenda.
Google
has become the ultimate puppet master, infecting people and manipulating them
without even knowing it. Their true goal is to be in complete control of all of
us, directing our behavior — and should we rebel, they also have partnered with
the military to create drones utilizing artificial intelligence to ensure
resistance will be defeated.
This
is eerily reminiscent of many science fiction books and productions, but we
have proof of what Google is doing — and we cannot go along with it. Google
refers to the goal of controlling humanity as “The Selfish Ledger,” described
in the video below. Our lives are being exploited by Google and other large
tech companies, and you have no idea how far they have come or where they are
going. The truth is, they can already predict and control your behavior.
Natural health and healing
threaten drug and vaccine industry profits
This sentence in the SEM Post
article9 cited earlier is key to understanding what’s going on: “If
the purpose of the page is harmful, then expertise doesn’t matter.” In other
words, if a page is deemed harmful to the public, it gets the lowest possible
rating regardless of expertise. And if pages don’t vanish automatically in the
new algorithm, quality raters will go in and manually manipulate crowdsourced
relevance to bury the page or pages.
Just
what might Google and its industrial and government/military allies deem
“harmful”? In short, pretty much anything that presents views differing from
the PR created by said allies, and that most certainly includes alternative and
holistic health, and articles revealing the truth about toxic industries,
including the drug and vaccine industries.
Indeed, Telapost lists10 Mercola.com
as one of the biggest losers in Google’s June 2019 core algorithm update, along
with other natural health sites and Vimeo — a direct competitor to Google’s
Youtube video platform. The article also notes that:11
“In
the QRG [quality rater guidelines], Google notes that raters should conduct
‘research on the reputation of the website or creator of the main content.’
Later
they say ‘… Wikipedia articles can help you learn about a company and may
include information specific to reputation, such as awards and other forms of
recognition, or also controversies and issues.’ If a news style website has a
poor reputation, factors on their site could correlate with what Google is
trying to push down in search results.”
I
will delve into Wikipedia’s role in this censorship movement in Part 2 of this
article, which will be published tomorrow.
Google is undoubtedly one of
the largest and clearest monopolies in the world. In fact, the company
monopolizes several different markets, including search and advertising. Bing,
its closest search competitor, has just 2% of the market — hardly a significant
threat to Google’s 90%.12 Google also controls about 60% of the global advertising
revenue on the internet.
So,
with this core algorithm update, Google is very effectively preventing a
majority of people worldwide from learning about how to protect and support
their health, which is nothing short of an attack on your civil liberties and
right to pursue health and happiness.
I’ve
written about the dangers of monopolies within the drug and agricultural
industries on numerous occasions, but Google is without a doubt the greatest
monopoly that has ever existed on the planet, and most people don’t even
realize it.
The technology giant has injected itself ever deeper into our
day-to-day lives, from childhood education to Android phones, to patented meat substitutes13 and health care. Google’s internet monopoly
combined with its creepy personal information tracking and sharing poses a very
unique threat to public health, privacy and well-being.
Anyone concerned about their health,
food or environment and their ability to obtain truthful information about any
of those issues needs to understand the role Google plays, and whose side
Google is really on. I’ll delve further into this in part 2.
Who are the Google quality
raters?
So, just who are these
quality raters Google hires to decide who’s who and what’s what, and manually
rank pages higher or lower? Ars Technica has written articles about the poor
working conditions of these raters. In April 2017, senior tech culture editor for
Ars Technica, Annalee Newitz, reported:14
“Few
people realize how much these raters contribute to the smooth functioning act
we call ‘Googling.’ Even Google engineers who work with rater data don’t know
who these people are. But some raters would now like that to change. That’s
because, earlier this month, thousands of them received an e-mail that said
their hours would be cut in half, partly due to changes in Google’s staffing
policies.
Though
Google boasts about its army of raters, the raters are not Google employees.
Instead, they are employed by firms who have contracted them to Google, full
time, for years on end. These raters believe that Google has reaped significant
benefits from their labor without ensuring their jobs are secure and stable. That’s
why 10 raters came to Ars Technica to tell the story of what their lives are
really like.”
At the time, Leapforce —
which was incorporated in 200815 — was one of the
largest companies supplying Google with raters. Most raters work from home and
virtually everyone, including managers, use online pseudonyms, preventing
employees from knowing who they’re really working with.
“To
get a task, raters log into Raterhub and see what’s available. Some days plenty
of tasks exists; on others, a rater might wait hours and be offered nothing … A
typical task takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 minutes, and the amount of
time the rater can bill for the task is pre-determined by Google,” Newitz
writes.16
In 2017, the hourly pay for a
rater ranged between $13.50 and $17.40.17 Effective
June 1, 2017, Google raters working in the U.S. could no longer bill for more
than 26 hours a week, which meant those working full-time (about 20% of
Leapforce raters) were reduced to part-time to minimize employee benefits.
In response to panicked
workers, Leapforce founder and CEO Daren Jackson18 told
the raters “this is not a change we are able to control,” and that the
abolishing of full-time work was due to “risk mitigation” related to
“regulations.”
According
to Newitz, a new Google policy stipulated they wanted to work with
employee-based workforces, so to keep its contract, Leapforce converted its
raters from independent contractors to employees. It was very likely unlawful
to have so many people independently contracted for these positions in the
first place.
However, Jackson told Newitz
he couldn’t convert his full-time contractors to full-time employees “because
Leapforce couldn’t afford health care for all of them,” as required under the
Affordable Healthcare Act. After speaking to Ars about their work conditions,
three of the raters were fired by Leapforce, Newitz reported in a subsequent
article.19
Leapforce founder is a former
Google employee
While Jackson claimed
Leapforce had other clients beside Google (which he would not name when asked
by Ars Technica), Google certainly appeared to be its largest. It should come
as no surprise then that Jackson and Leapforce didn’t just appear out of the
blue. In fact, as reported by Newitz, Jackson used to work for Google. She
writes:20
“Jackson
told Ars that he started Leapforce in 2008 after quitting Google, where he had
been working on a project called EWOQ. EWOQ is the precursor to Raterhub,
though its origins are shrouded in secrecy. We do know that, as early as 2004,
Google had a quality rater tool … At that time, raters were hired directly by
Google …
But
by the time Google purchased the website Raterhub.com in 2012, all of Google’s
raters were coming from contracting companies like Leapforce, Lionbridge,
Appen, and ZeroChaos. Many of Leapforce’s raters still call the tool they use
at Raterhub ‘EWOQ,’ though one told me that they have no idea why, nor what it
stands for.”
In
essence, the separation between Leapforce and Google appears to have been
little more than a legal fiction that shielded Google from any legal
liabilities for the way this workforce was treated.
In a subsequent article,21 published
May 2, 2017, Newitz pointed out that Jackson had just created yet another
rating company called RaterLabs,22 and was in the process
of transferring raters from Leapforce to RaterLabs, but at reduced pay rates.
As reported by Newitz in a
third article,23 published December 1, 2017, Leapforce/RaterLabs were
ultimately acquired by a top competitor, Appen.24 She
also reported that several Leapforce raters had filed complaints with employee
rights groups. Two of the raters fired after speaking to Ars Technica filed
complaints with the National Labor Relations Board. Both cases were reportedly
settled.
Google is not an independent
actor in its censorship movement
While
some argue that Google, being a private company, has the right to do whatever
it wants, even if that means creating algorithms that censor important and
relevant news and health insights while manually burying “undesirable” pages to
protect the profits of its advertisers and other financial stakeholders.
However, being one of the
biggest monopolies in the world, one could argue Google has really become more
of a utility (like gas, water and electric utilities), and as such has a
responsibility to serve the people. In fact, last year, U.S. House Rep. Steve
King, R-Iowa, suggested Google and Facebook be turned into, and regulated as,
public utilities.25
After
all, if you want to find an answer on the web what do you do? You Google it,
you don’t just “search.” Google worked for many years to earn your trust, but
it was just setting a trap to twist that trust into powerful control.
Unfortunately,
even if such an idea were to gain traction (which it has not), it still
wouldn’t solve the problem, as Google is not acting independently, but rather
is merely fulfilling a role within a much larger complex that includes the U.S.
government, its military and national security apparatus, as well as several of
the wealthiest and most powerful industries on the planet. I’ll delve into
these issues in part 2 tomorrow.
All of these “partners” have
a vested interest in censoring information addressed by yours truly on a daily
basis; information relating to nondrug options for the prevention and treatment
of disease and/or warnings about dangerous treatments, drugs and vaccines, for
example, or the benefits of regenerative agriculture over
conventional farming and fake meat, or the hazards of toxic chemicals found in
everyday products and food.
Again,
as explained earlier, Google’s latest core algorithm update and quality rater
guidelines bury all of this information, favoring instead information relayed
by sites that are either part of this industrial-technological-military-government
complex, or that peddle the desired talking points.
It
doesn’t matter that I’m reporting on and referencing publicly available
peer-reviewed research and have a whole panel of medical and scientific experts
reviewing much of the information, because the science I highlight is the
science industry doesn’t want you to see.
Few
are ever going to take the time to dig up these studies even though they’re
readily available, and thus by censoring me and other online sources like
myself, the industrial-technological-military-government complex’s task of
social engineering is significantly simplified.
The
information I share about pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, GMOs, pesticides,
junk food, fake meat, artificial sweeteners and other dangerous additives are
prime targets for censorship for the simple reason that when you take control
of your health, they LOSE control over you. By being informed, you take their
power over you away from them.
What can you do?
I have been writing about Google for
years because I knew this day would come. June 3, 2019, Google predictably
removed my website and several other health sites from its search results.
It’s a wakeup call for everyone, and
now more than ever we must work together to share this information with others
by word of mouth, by text and email. 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. It’s
time to boycott and share! Here are a few other 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 that are seriously interested in their health, please share
important articles with them and encourage them to subscribe to our newsletter.
•Use the internal Mercola.com search engine when
searching for articles on my site. Nearly all major search websites except
Yahoo! and Bing still use Google as their primary engines and have their own
privacy issues. Then you have sites like StartPage and DuckDuckGo, which
provide greater privacy than Google, but rely on Google’s search results.
•Boycott Google by
avoiding any and all Google products:
◦Uninstall Google Chrome
and use Brave or Opera browser instead, available for all
computers and mobile devices.28 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,29 an encrypted email service based in Switzerland
◦Stop using Google docs.
Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives30
◦If you’re a high school
student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into
personal accounts
Sources and References
- 1 Twitter.com Google Search Liason June 3, 2019
- 2, 3, 10, 11 Telapost, The June 4, 2019 Google broad core
algorithm update
- 4 150sec.com May 23, 2019
- 5, 8, 9 The SEM Post.com May 17, 2019
- 6, 7 Telapost
2019 Google quality rater guidelines
- 12 CBS News May 21, 2018
- 13 BBC News August 5, 2013
- 14, 16, 17, 20 Arstechnica.om April 27, 2017
- 15 Corporationwiki.com Daren Jackson company: Leapforce
- 18 Crunchbase.com Daren Jackson
- 19, 23 Arstechnica.com December 1, 2017
- 21 Arstechnica.com May 2, 2017
- 22 Corporationwiki.com Daren Jackson company: Raterlabs
- 24 Passleapforceexam.com November 30, 2017
- 25 Tech Crunch July 17, 2018
- 26 Fast Company, Inside DuckDuckGo
- 27 Startpage.com
- 28 Opera
Browser
- 29 ProtonMail
- 30 Digital Trends April 28, 2017
Copyright © 2019 Dr. Joseph Mercola
