Modern Day Censorship

What surprised me about the suppression of my two blog posts on Newton and NASA, regarding the hollow Earth hypothesis, was not so much the suppression itself, but the level at which it occurred. While I had quite expected my blog to become virtually impossible to find on the web, I had not expected Blogger itself to rank my blog posts according to its own standards.

I have had no illusion about this blog ever becoming widely available through Google searches. The purpose of my blog is after all to highlight odd little facts that do not fit the mainstream narrative. My blog is in other words a "fake news" site, and everybody knows that Google aims to suppress such channels in favor of channels that support the Status Quo. My blog is in other words going to be permanently suppressed by Google.

What came as a surprise is that the mechanisms used to suppress blogs like my own are also used to suppress individual blog posts. Blogger appears to weigh blog posts against their particular standards in much the same way Google weighs entire blogs.

This should not have surprised me, though.

Google owns Blogger. Google can easily lend Blogger a hand in doing a ranking, and the way it works is almost certainly as follows:

Having already been labelled a "fake news" site by Google, Blogger runs a list of keywords against every blog post I publish. If any of these keywords are found in a blog post, it is given a penalty of a certain percentage.

In the case of my blog posts on Newton and NASA, the keywords that kicked in were "Newton" and "NASA". These are two important authorities. Any mention of them in a "fake news" site should therefore be heavily penalized.

This will have the effect of making the said blog posts harder to find. They do not disappear. They are not censored in the old fashioned way. They are merely suppressed.

The beauty of this in the eye of the censors is that it is a relentless mechanism that will sway public opinion over time, and it can be presented as a real service and benefit to the public in general. Most people prefer the general accepted narrative. Some can even get very angry at being presented with alternatives. For these people, the suppression mechanism is seen as a great service.

Authors of blog posts on the other hand discover to their bemusement that some popular blog posts do not appear in their top ten statistics, and just like me, they start asking questions.

Cielo Estrera, a Facebook friend of mine, pointed me to a FAQ page for Blogger designed to handle this precise question. The answers were quite telling. While Google admitted that some posts would at times be ranked lower than expected, the reasons for this were too complex to explain. All sorts of excuses were presented. None of them very convincing.

The only way blog posts can be suppressed as much as 50% relative to view counts is through direct interference. When Blogger generates statistics for presentation purposes, they pull out the view counts AND the suppression metrics. The sum of the two determines the ranking.

What we have is a system of layered suppression put in place by the establishment. Everything is ranked and weighted according to a metric designed to support the Status Quo.

This happens at all levels, and not only in the realm of information. It happens in financial markets and in politics too. Everything is ranked and weighed.

Nothing is banned outright. Everything is available for the one who looks. It's just made as difficult as possible to find the alternative views. Modern day censorship is presented to the public as a service, and is largely accepted as such by the average person.