Google
Content Removed
Shadow Banned
COVID-19On October 4, 2020, a group of doctors published The Great Barrington Declaration. It was essentially a statement recommending different methods of dealing with the “pandemic” instead of locking people down and shutting down businesses. Over the next few days, it amassed over 100k signatures. It opens with the following:
The Great Barrington Declaration – As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
A day or so later, a link to the declaration appeared in both the r/COVID19 and r/Coronavirus subreddits and was promptly removed from both. This doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with Reddit itself since there is a post that remains up on the r/LockdownSkepticism subreddit.
However, a few days later, people started noticing that Google was heavily censoring the search resuts for The Great Barrington Declaration. The propagandized results didn’t even contain the declaration itself. They instead contained smears and lies about the declaration and the people behind it. Twitter user @boriquagato (now suspended) published a great thread which in part contained screenshots of Google’s results vs Bing’s, as shown below:
from the “make orwell fiction again” files:
google has memory holed the great barrington declaration
not only have they wiped it from the top results, they have salted it with false claims about “climate denial”
it’s pure, simple propaganda
here’s bing (who plays it straight)
– el gato malo (@boriquagato) 10 Oct 2020
the google results for “great barrington declaration” are simply not search results at all.
it’s a propagandistic hit piece ducking the science, ignoring the credentials of the authors, failing to show the declaration, and spinning it as some kind of fringe cabal of “deniers.”
– el gato malo (@boriquagato) 10 Oct 2020
