As Russian paranoia continues to consume Washington and the nation’s pundits, Russia Today, a Kremlin-owned news outlet believed by some to have meddled in the 2016 presidential election, is now required to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).
The news outlet joins Canada’s CBC, Japan’s NHK, and China Daily on the FARA list. While the requirement to register does not shut down the news outlet or make it unavailable for residents of the U.S. to access, Russia Today will now need to provide the Justice Department with internal, operational information, such as salaries and contact details of employees.
Not to be outdone, Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt joined in the dog pile by announcing that Google’s search engine would make it more difficult for its users to find and read any RT story. This will be done by moving any RT search results further down the search rankings. Another Russian news outlet, Sputnik, will face the same treatment by Google.
Sure, Google users can keep scrolling through pages and pages of search results and eventually find those RT results, but after a while most users will give up looking after a few pages. From now on, most of us will most likely never see another RT link through Google again. So much for unbiased and objective search results.
Schmidt explains this special treatment of RT and Sputnik has nothing to do with the current political climate or an attempt to censor the two news outlets. It’s just an algorithm doing the dirty work. It’s not really censorship if an algorithm is manipulating the search results.
“I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do. It’s a very legitimate question as to how we rank, A or B, right? And we do the best we can in millions and millions of rankings every day.”
See? Google isn’t really manipulating the search results to eliminate unfriendly or news stories deemed anti-American. A higher, objective being, an algorithm, has decided to make those stories disappear, like magic. This all-knowing, powerful algorithm knows what content is good for us and what content should be made to disappear. It can distinguish real news from fake news. What would we do without such a wise gatekeeper to save us from news that might harm us?
Google’s ability to bury RT search results, to decide what their users will see, is one step closer to the day when media conglomerates and their government partners will once again control what news we see and what news we don’t. They will become the new gatekeepers, having the authority to decide what content is subversive or propagandistic and what content is proper and suitable for our delicate sensibilities.
With revelations of technology companies working hand in glove with the CIA and NSA to build an even more intrusive surveillance state, Google’s unapologetic–nearly boastful–announcement that they will, in effect, censor RT and Sputnik is quite telling.
Whether it’s simple human intuition, a finger on the pulse of the American psyche by the top Google brass and engineers, or a result of some extensive data mining of mood and sentiment across the vast network of social media, there does appear to be a growing confidence among tech companies—and their government handlers—that Americans have grown apathetic and disinterested on issues of privacy and censorship. If Americans don’t seem to mind all of those Wikileaks revelations that their own government has been spying on them for years, then they surely won’t mind if we begin censoring the news they consume. Come on in, the water’s fine.
More than a few years ago it might have been unthinkable for a media company to freely admit that they themselves will decide what news is “fit to print” and what news will never see the light of day.
Remember the outcry back in 2005 when it was revealed that Yahoo handed over information to Chinese state security officials to help them convict a Chinese journalist for sending a post to a Chinese-language website in New York? The Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Americans were appalled that Yahoo would collaborate with an authoritarian Communist regime and hand over a democratic activist just so they could continue doing business there.
It’s one thing to help China monitor and censor news and content to its 700 million Internet users—and chalk it up to the price of doing business–but to assist them in locking away a journalist for 10 years is more than shameful. It was a heartless act, a pact made with the devil, an exchange of one journalist’s freedom for market access and all the profit that comes with securing a foothold in the largest Internet market in the world.
And while it’s been known for a long time that Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and other Internet service and equipment companies have been assisting China in monitoring and censoring news and content to the country’s 700 million Internet users, we always thought it could never happen here in the United States.
Well, if Google’s open and boastful admission that they will de-rank RT and Sputnik news articles and, in effect, make them inaccessible to their users, is not seen as a step towards that same kind of collaboration with state power, then we truly are asleep.
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