If you can’t find it, you can’t read it.
Big Tech has discovered another way to silence dissenting voices.
This time the victim is Mercola.com, known to subscribers as “Dr. Mercola.” In its latest search engine update, implemented June 3, Google “buries” Dr. Mercola (https://www.healthglu.com/uncategorized/google-buries-mercola-in-their-latest-search-engine-update-part-1-of-2/) by removing “most Mercola.com pages from its search results.” Now the only way a Mercola.com page will come up is if the user searches, for instance, “Mercola.com heart disease” instead of just “heart disease.”
“This year we’ve seen an unprecedented rush to implement censorship of critical voices,” Dr. Mercola says. Big Tech, he says, makes money by helping “fascist government-industrial complexes” to silence dissenters and critics.
Dr. Mercola’s crime, it seems, was to question the need for and the effectiveness of various vaccines–the new measles vaccine, for one, which he has said “offers only temporary artificial immunity” (https://articles.mercola.com/measles.aspx). Dr. Mercola has dissented from the current panic over measles, saying most of the measles deaths are the result of poor nutrition and generally poor health in Third World countries. Apparently there’s someone who doesn’t like that opinion and doesn’t think the public ought to read it.
They haven’t erased him: just made it harder for users to find him.
It’s not quite as draconian as the 2016 Democrat proposal to make “climate change denial” a crime with criminal sanctions–but it has caused Dr. Mercola’s Internet traffic to “plummet by 99 percent in recent weeks” since the update.
Not draconian, but certainly effective.
Is this how “science” is going to be done from now on? By silencing anyone who questions any claim made by a powerful establishment?
But that’s not science, is it?
No, it is not science. Sometimes, I wonder if there really is such a thing as science any more. I checked on one of the BP meds that had been prescribed to one of my sons, and found that this brand has been found to contain cancer causing ingredients, but the report continued; but the FDA advises not to stop taking it. Lovely, eh?
I take Enalapril. What am I supposed to do if there’s something wrong with that?
I think Dr. Mercola is a quack and some of the stuff I’ve read from his site is downright dangerous. I have a friend who shares articles from his site frequently, and I don’t know what alarms me more: the bad science and advice in the articles, or the fact that she is a health care worker who believes this stuff.
Having said that, Google shouldn’t be manipulating search results like this. Research has always been a big thing for me; especially while actively home schooling. The more Google tweaked their algorithms, the harder it became to do real research. It’s Dr. Mercola, this time, but all sorts of health information has been increasingly hard to find, even when I know exact titles of research papers or used very specific keywords. Climate related searches have also been all but useless for many years. Same with scientific research or statistical data related to things like abortion, sexuality and other hot topic social issues. It’s now common for my search results to come up with exactly the opposite of what I was actually looking for.
I prefer DuckDuckGo, but a lot of stuff is still hard to find. It makes doing research increasingly difficult.
You say he’s a quack, somebody else says he’s great, and I have no opinion. I don’t read medical stuff. But I would rather not have Far Left Crazy deciding who’s a quack and who isn’t. I don’t believe there’s any such thing, anymore, as an honest liberal.
Agreed.
It’s hard to make an informed decision when you are denied full information. I may think he’s a quack, but others should be able to decide that for themselves, too!
As for liberal honesty; there is a … condition, for lack of a better word… where people believe that the only reality is their own. If they say something is true, then it is true. It is a form of mental illness but I have also encountered is as cultural psychopathy, where a person would literally invent laws, believed that was enough to make them real, then threatened me with police action if I broke these invented laws. He actually did call the police on us.
I think there is something similar happening within liberalism. Their alternate reality is whatever they believe it is, logic and evidence be damned. They have created their cultural psychopathy and truth is whatever they want it to be. Therefore, in their minds, whatever they say is true, and anyone who disagrees must be false. Hence the cries of Trump being all about hate, or racism, or whatever else they throw out, even when all evidence shows otherwise.
They are by no means sane.
The Information Age sure has had some strange side effects. I don’t know this doctor from Adam, but Google & Co. shouldn’t decide which results I see based upon their opinion on the matter.