Google’s June
2019 broad core algorithm update, which started taking effect June 3,
and its updated quality rater guidelines have effectively removed
Mercola.com from Google search results
When entering a
health-related search word into Google, you will no longer find
Mercola.com articles in the search results. The only way to locate
Mercola articles is by adding “Mercola.com” to the search word(s) in
question
One of the
primary sources Google’s quality raters are instructed to use when
assessing the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of an
author or site is Wikipedia
Wikipedia is
censoring information and crafting narratives to benefit certain groups;
it started censoring information and blocking editors shortly after its
inception. Co-founder Larry Sanger calls Wikipedia “a broken system”
Together with
Amazon, Apple and Facebook, Google is amassing “an army” of lobbyists —
75% of which have served in government or on political campaigns — to
ensure survival as antitrust investigations into the four companies get
underway
For the first part of this two-part
article, see yesterday's post, "Google buries Mercola in their latest
search engine update,' Part 1 of 2."
In Part 1, I discussed the effects Google's June 2019 broad core
algorithm update and updated quality rater guidelines is having on
traffic to this site.
As mentioned in Part 1, Google's "quality
raters" are now manually lowering the ranking of undesirable content and
buries even expert views if they're deemed "harmful" to the public.
Google raters use Wikipedia for 'expertise' and 'trustworthiness'
One of the primary sources Google's quality raters are instructed to
use when assessing the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness
of an author or website is Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia." Excerpts
from my Wikipedia page read:1
"Joseph Michael Mercola (born 1954) is an
alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and Web
entrepreneur, who markets a variety of controversial dietary supplements
and medical devices through his website, Mercola.com …
Mercola criticizes many aspects of standard medical practice, such as vaccination and what he views as overuse of prescription drugs and surgery to treat diseases.
On
his website mercola.com, Mercola and colleagues advocate a number of
unproven alternative health notions including homeopathy, and
anti-vaccine positions … Mercola's medical claims have been criticized
by business, regulatory, medical, and scientific communities."
RationalWiki, the stated purpose of which is to analyze and refute "pseudoscience and the anti-science movement" presents me as:2
"[A] member of the right-wing quack outfit Association of
American Physicians and Surgeons. Mercola advocates and provides a forum
for many classic crank medical ideas, such as vaccine hysteria and the
belief that modern (sorry, "allopathic") medicine kills more people than
it helps. His website is a veritable spring of pseudoscience, quackery,
and logical fallacies. He is also a promoter of the idea of an AMA/Big
Pharma/FDA conspiracy."
It comes as no surprise then that Mercola.com is listed as one of the
biggest losers in Google's June 2019 core algorithm update.3
Since its implementation, Google traffic to my site has dropped by
approximately 99%, as no Mercola.com pages will now appear in search
results using keywords only.
To have any chance of finding my articles using Google search, you
have to add "Mercola.com" to your search term (example: "Mercola.com
heart disease" or "Mercola.com Type 2 diabetes"). Even skipping the
".com" will minimize relevant search results.
Wikipedia isn't what it pretends to be
How can Wikipedia be a primary authority of credibility when the
editors are anonymous and uncredentialed? Wikipedia has bizarre
policies, including to never use a primary source for information - only
'secondary' sources are considered applicable for sourcing information.
In the 2016 Full Measure article4 "The Dark Side of Wikipedia," investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson exposed the fact that Wikipedia is censoring information and crafting narratives to benefit certain groups:
"The promise of accurate, neutral articles and privacy for
contributors is often just a mirage, according to two insiders. They say
they've been left battle-scarred after troubling personal encounters
with the world's most popular encyclopedia. It's billed as 'the
encyclopedia anyone can edit.' But for many, it's the opposite."
While Google's censoring of content is a more recent phenomenon,
Wikipedia has been censoring information and blocking editors since the
beginning. According to Greg Kohs, one of the insiders interviewed by
Attkisson, about 1,000 users are blocked from the platform on any given
day.5 Attkisson writes:
"When Kohs ran afoul of Wikipedia, he was drawn into an unseen
cyberworld. One where he says volunteer editors dole out punishment and
retaliation, privacy is violated and special interests control
information."
As reported by Attkisson, Wikipedia is often edited by people with a
very specific agenda, and anyone who tries to clarify or clear up
inaccuracies on the site is simply blocked. The reality is a far cry
from Wikipedia's public promise, which is to provide readers with
unbiased information.
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'Inmates running the asylum'
Even Lawrence (Larry) Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, bailed ship the very next year,6 saying "trolls sort of took over" the site, that "The inmates started running the asylum,"7
and that "In some fields and some topics, there are groups who 'squat'
on articles and insist on making them reflect their own specific
biases."8,9
Earlier this year, Sanger told 150Sec he and co-founder Jimmy Wales
tried to "figure out how to rein in the bad actors." He admits they were
never able to devise a good strategy for that, and as a result,
"Wikipedia is a broken system."10,11 Full Measure reports:12
"In Wikipedia's world, the ruling authorities are the hundreds of
volunteer editors who've reached the most powerful editing status.
They're called 'administrators,' known only by their pseudonyms or user
names. They always win the edit wars.
Sharyl: The more edits you make, the longer you've been making them, the more power you're going to have? Kohs: Yes.
But what happens when powerful editors improperly control
content? Kohs: You'll have different people with a particular scientific
point of view and they'll edit and modify Wikipedia so that its
articles kind of reflect that point of view …
Two trusted Wikipedia officials were exposed running businesses
that covertly edited Wikipedia for PR clients. Interests for Sony, the
CIA, the Vatican, Barack Obama and John McCain all reportedly have been
caught secretly editing their own Wikipedia pages to their advantage.
And anonymous Wikipedia editors maintain a stranglehold on
selected topics … One study found mistakes in nine out of ten Wikipedia
medical entries. Millions of dollars can depend on how an idea or
product is portrayed within the computer pages …
Kohs: When you read Wikipedia, you have to be aware that the
people who are writing it, who don't identify themselves, who don't
necessarily have any credentials to be writing in the subject matter
that they've chosen to write in, are very often pushing an agenda."
Wikipedia is controlled by special interests
Three years later, May 25, 2019, Attkisson wrote13
about her own struggles with Wikipedia. She also discussed it in a TedX
talk (above) on astroturf tools. "My own battle with Wikipedia included
being unable to correct provably false facts such as incorrect job
history, incorrect birth place and incorrect birth date," she writes,
adding:14
"What's worse is that agenda editors related
to pharmaceutical interests and the partisan blog Media Matters control
my Wikipedia biographical page, making sure that slanted or false
information stays on it. For example, they falsely refer to my reporting
as 'anti-vaccine,' and imply my reporting on the topic has been
discredited.
In fact, my vaccine and medical reporting has been recognized by
top national journalism awards organizations, and has even been cited as
a source in a peer reviewed scientific publication. However, anyone who
tries to edit this factual context and footnotes onto my page finds it
is quickly removed.
What persists on my page, however, are sources that are
supposedly disallowed by Wikipedia's policies. They include citations by
Media Matters, with no disclosure that it's a partisan blog.
Another entity quoted on my Wikipedia biographical page to
disparage my work is the vaccine industry's Dr. Paul Offit. But there's
no mention of the lawsuits filed15
against Offit for libel (one prompted him to apologize and correct his
book), or the fact that he provided false information about his work and
my reporting to the Orange County Register, which later corrected16 its article.
Obviously, these facts would normally make Offit an unreliable
source, but for Wikipedia, he's presented as if an unconflicted expert.
In fact, Wikipedia doesn't even mention that's Offit is a vaccine
industry insider who's made millions of dollars off of vaccines …
The powerful interests that 'watch' and control the pages make
sure Offit's background is whitewashed and that mine is subtly
tarnished. They will revert or change any edits that attempt to correct
the record."
Sanger believes the solution to the Wikipedia problem is a
decentralized blockchain system where edits are approved by a community.
This is how Everipedia, which Sanger joined in 2017, is run. He told
150Sec:17
"Since last July, every edit to Everipedia has had to be approved by the community of IQ token-holders. 'IQ'
is the Everipedia token, or cryptocurrency. If someone uploads nonsense
or copyrighted text, we downvote it. This already provides for a layer
of editorial oversight that Wikipedia lacks.
We have barely even started to explore what will be possible when
there is no centralized control of editorial policy, when editorial
decisions are made according to various smart contract-driven systems,
and when participation in the system is remunerated by the system
itself."
Wikipedia co-founder openly hostile against holistic medicine
As early as 2010, the Alliance for Natural Health pointed out the
impossibility of finding "information that isn't heavily biased toward
conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry" on Wikipedia,18 and matters certainly have not improved in the years since. If anything, they've gotten much, much worse.
Still,
even back then, ANH gave several examples of the blatant censorship of
holistic medicine. As just one example, the president of the American
Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine was prevented from posting positive
information about antiaging derived from the academy's own research.
From
where I stand, it seems Sanger's co-founding partner, Wales, is part of
the problem. Wales is openly hostile against holistic medicine, and in
2014 rejected a Change.org petition to bring in more positive discussion
of holistic medicine on Wikipedia. As reported by Business Insider:19
"The petition, which has nearly 8,000 supporters, calls for
people to stop donating to Wikipedia in response to what it called
'biased, misleading, out-of-date, or just plain wrong' information about
holistic approaches to healing."
Wales' response:20
"No, you have to be kidding me … Wikipedia's policies around this
kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work
published in respectable scientific journals — that is to say, if you
can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then
Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn't."
Google funds Wikipedia
Considering Wikipedia's history of bias and its incredibly effective
blocking of opposing views, no matter how factual, it's not surprising
that Wikipedia is Google's chosen arbiter of expertise and credibility.
It also means the whole "quality rating" system Google has set up is
rotten from the ground up, as its quality raters are instructed to base
their quality decisions on an already biased source.
As reported by Tech Crunch,21
in January 2019, Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia Endowment,
Wikipedia's parent organization, and another $1.1 million to the
Wikimedia Foundation. Together, Wikipedia and Google are also working on
Project Tiger, which will expand Wikipedia's content into more
languages. In a blog post, Google president Jacquelline Fuller wrote:22
"While efforts to empower editors will help them continue to add
more information and knowledge to the web, we also aim to support the
long-term health of the Wikimedia projects so they are available for
generations to come."
In other words, biased Wikipedia editors will receive even more
support, and with the backing and injections of funding from Google,
Wikipedia will be in an excellent position to further the stranglehold
on natural health in years to come.
Antitrust complaints ignored
As mentioned in part 1, Google is the largest monopoly in the world.
Yet while the European Union successfully raised antitrust charges
against Google, resulting in a $2.7 billion fine — and this despite the
revolving door between Google and EU policy advisers23 — the U.S. has continued to look the other way.
The Federal Trade Commission investigation that took place during the
Obama administration, for example, resulted in no formal action
whatsoever.24 One possible reason for this, Music Technology Policy25
suggested back in 2016, could be because Google managed to install one
of its former lawyers in the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust
division, thereby protecting the company's interests.
The revolving door swings both ways, of course. In 2007, Google paid
Makan Delrahim — a lawyer and current deputy assistant attorney general
of the DOJ's antitrust division — $100,00026 to lobby for the approval of its acquisition of DoubleClick, which was under antitrust review.27,28 Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has also pointed out that Delrahim lobbied on behalf of Apple in 2006 and 2007.
As reported by The New York Times29 and The Verge,30 Delrahim "is now facing pressure to recuse himself if the Justice Department pursues an investigation …" A study31
by Public Citizen published May 23, 2019, found a whopping 59% of FTC
officials entered into financial relationships with technology companies
after leaving the agency.
All of this brings us to the issue of monopolization and the corruption that inevitably follows.32
It is very clear that there is no company operating in breach of
antitrust rules as blatantly as Google. Absolute power corrupts
absolutely, and this adage certainly fits when describing Google. As
reported by The Washington Post in 2017:33
"Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to
acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point … The moment where it no
longer wants to allow dissent …
Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any
threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are
entitled to shut down dissent. As Lord Acton famously said, 'Despotic
power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.' Those with too
much power cannot help but be evil.
Google, the company dedicated to free expression, has chosen to
silence opposition, apparently without any sense of irony … [I]n recent
years, Google has become greedy about owning not just search capacities,
video and maps, but also the shape of public discourse."
Google recruits law professors to defend its corporate views
To help sway public opinion and policy, Google has also recruited law
professors to back up and promote its views. According to a 2017
Campaign for Accountability report,34 Google has paid academics in both the U.S. and Europe millions of dollars to influence public opinion and policymakers alike.35,36
This
includes funding research papers "that appear to support the technology
company's business interests and defend against regulatory challenges
such as antitrust and anti-piracy." Some of these academics have not
declared the source of their funding, even though payments have reached
as high as $400,000.37 As noted by The Times:38
"On one occasion Eric Schmidt, Google's former chief executive,
cited a Google-funded author in written answers to Congress to back his
claim that his company was not a monopoly — without mentioning that it
had paid for the paper …"
'Tech giants amass lobbying army'
Power can be assessed by looking at lobbying expenditures and Google
is leading the pack when it comes to corporate spending on lobbying —
efforts primarily aimed at eliminating competitors and gaining power
over others. Google also appears to take full advantage of its power
over organizations that it helps fund, which is one reason to be
suspicious of its donations to Wikipedia.
According to a June 5, 2019, article39
in The New York Times, "[F]our of the biggest technology companies are
amassing an army of lobbyists as they prepare for what could be an epic
fight over their futures." The four companies in question are Google,
Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Combined, these four tech giants spent $55
million on lobbying in 2018 — double what they spent in 2016. The New
York Times continues:40
"As they have tracked increasing public and political discontent
with their size, power, handling of user data and role in elections, the
four companies have intensified their efforts to lure lobbyists with
strong connections to the White House, the regulatory agencies, and
Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
Of the 238 people registered to lobby for the four companies in the
first three months of this year … about 75 percent formerly served in
the government or on political campaigns … Many worked in offices or for
officials who could have a hand in deciding the course of the new
governmental scrutiny.
The influence campaigns encompass a broad range of activities,
including calls on members of Congress, advertising, funding of
think-tank research and efforts to get the attention of President Trump
…"
Earlier this week, the threat of government action became more real,
driving down their stock prices. The House Judiciary Committee
announced a broad antitrust investigation into big tech.
And the two top federal antitrust agencies agreed to divide
oversight over Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google as they explore
whether the companies have abused their market power to harm competition
and consumers …
The industry's troubles mean big paydays for the lawyers, political
operatives and public relations experts hired to ward off regulations,
investigations and lawsuits that could curtail the companies' huge
profits."
Going forward, the DOJ will be investigating Google and Apple —
conveniently, the two companies that antitrust department head Delrahim
lobbied for in the past — while the Federal Trade Commission will have
jurisdiction over Amazon and Facebook.
Google — An integral part of the national security state?
Google could potentially also garner some protection or aid from the
U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). According to an Aljazeera report41
published in 2014, emails reveal a cozy relationship between Google and
the NSA, with coordination occurring at the highest levels.
Two years later, in March 2016, Wired reported42
the executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet and former
Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, had been chosen by the Pentagon to chair its
new Defense Innovation Advisory Board. According to a Pentagon press
release:43
"The board will seek to advise the department on areas that are
deeply familiar to Silicon Valley companies, such as rapid prototyping,
iterative product development, complex data analysis in business
decision making, the use of mobile and cloud applications, and
organizational information sharing."
Google is not what it seems
In his article,44
"Google is not what it seems," Wikileaks founder Julian Assange also
details "the special relationship between Google, Hillary Clinton and
the State Department." I recommend reading through this detailed and comprehensive analysis for your own edification. The article is an extract from his book, "When Google Met Wikileaks." He writes in part:
"Google is 'different.' Google is 'visionary.' Google is 'the
future.' Google is 'more than just a company.' Google 'gives back to the
community.' Google is 'a force for good' … The company's reputation is
seemingly unassailable. Google's colorful, playful logo is imprinted on
human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a
year — an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other
company in history.
Caught red-handed … making petabytes of personal data available
to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google
nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its 'don't
be evil' doublespeak …
Even anti-surveillance campaigners cannot help themselves, at
once condemning government spying but trying to alter Google's invasive
surveillance practices using appeasement strategies. Nobody wants to
acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has.
Schmidt's tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of
US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive
megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this
proximity.
Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired
Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had
been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA).
And even as Schmidt's Google developed an image as the overly
friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with
the intelligence community. In 2003 the US National Security Agency
(NSA) had already started systematically violating the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) under its director General Michael
Hayden.
These were the days of the 'Total Information Awareness' program.
Before PRISM was ever dreamed of … the NSA was already aiming to
'collect it all, sniff it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it
all.'
During the same period, Google — whose publicly declared
corporate mission is to collect and 'organize the world's information
and make it universally accessible and useful' — was accepting NSA money
to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency with search tools for
its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge."
Assange also points out what he calls a "crucial detail" in the
media's reporting on the email correspondence between Schmidt, Google
co-founder Sergei Brin and NSA chief general Keith Alexander:
"'Your insights as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base,'
Alexander wrote to Brin, 'are valuable to ensure ESF's [Enduring
Security Framework program] efforts have measurable impact' …
The Department of Homeland Security defines the Defense
Industrial Base as 'the worldwide industrial complex that enables
research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and
maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or
parts, to meet U.S. military requirements' [emphasis added].
The Defense Industrial Base provides 'products and services that
are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations.'
Does it include regular commercial services purchased by the US
military?
No. The definition specifically excludes the purchase of regular
commercial services. Whatever makes Google a 'key member of the Defense
Industrial Base,' it is not recruitment campaigns pushed out through
Google AdWords or soldiers checking their Gmail …
Google's geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the
foreign-policy agenda of the world's largest superpower. As Google's
search and internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its
industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world's
population … and racing to extend internet access in the global south,
Google is steadily becoming the internet for many people.
Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of
individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course
of history. If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should
be of serious concern to people all over the world … for whom the
internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural,
economic, and strategic hegemony."
Decentralization is key — And it's coming
Just as Sanger realized a decentralized system is the best way to create a new, more bias-resilient version of Wikipedia,45
others have realized a decentralized web is the answer to Google's
monopoly, growing censorship and rapidly deteriorating privacy online.
A June 3, 2019 article46
on Mediapost.com presents the ideas of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf
and Brewster Kahle — three early web inventors — who are actively trying
to devise ways to "protect and rebuild the open nature of the web."
Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, had
originally envisioned it as an open source space. Realizing how private
corporations have locked it down, he's now working on another,
decentralized, internet solution.47 As reported by Mediapost.com:48
"'We demonstrated that the web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done,' Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair.
The web has 'ended up producing — [through] no deliberate action of the
people who designed the platform — a large-scale emergent phenomenon
which is anti-human.'
So, they're out to fix it, working on what they call the Dweb. The
'd' in Dweb stands for distributed. In distributed systems, no one
entity has control over the participation of any other entity.
Berners-Lee is building a platform called Solid, designed to give people
control over their own data.
Other global projects also have the goal of taking take back the
public web. Mastodon is decentralized Twitter. Peertube is a
decentralized alternative to YouTube. This July 18 - 21, web activists
plan to convene at the Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco …
Last year's Dweb gathering convened more than 900 developers,
activists, artists, researchers, lawyers, and students. Kahle opened the
gathering by reminding attendees that the web used to be a place where
everyone could play.
'Today, I no longer feel like a player, I feel like I'm being
played. Let's build a decentralized web, let's build a system we can
depend on, a system that doesn't feel creepy' he said …"
Boycott Google and support decentralized initiatives
Why does Google and its allies fear Mercola.com and feel the need to
censor the information we provide? I believe the Wikipedia page created
about me and held hostage by my detractors offer strong hints at the
parties that would like to shut me up by shutting me down.
In the end, it's going to come down to a battle between those wanting
to concentrate power against those trying to decentralize it. If we
work together to boycott them, Google will crumble under its own
colossal weight.
• Boycott Google by avoiding any and all Google products:
◦ Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include DuckDuckGo49 and Startpage50 ◦ Uninstall Google Chrome and use the Opera browser instead, available for all computers and mobile devices.51
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, close it and open an account with a non-Google affiliated email service such as ProtonMail,52 and encrypted email service based in Switzerland ◦ Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives53 ◦ If you're a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts
As mentioned in part 1 and at the beginning of this article, you can
no longer get any of my articles using keyword searches only in a
Google-based search engine. You can also see the impact over the years
in the graph below.
To find my articles, you have to add "Mercola.com" to your search
term (example: "Mercola.com heart disease" or "Mercola.com Type 2
diabetes"). Even skipping the ".com" will minimize your search results.
So, moving forward, here are a few suggestions for how to stay
connected:
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, share important articles with them and encourage them
subscribe to our newsletter.
Nearly all major search engines except Yahoo! and Bing use Google as
their primary engines, so if you use them, be sure to type mercola.com
in your search query. This way, you will still find our deeply buried
content. Remember, relevant Mercola.com articles will NOT show when
you're using a keyword search alone anymore.
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