By David R. Hoffman

 

 

In several recent Pravda.Ru articles I discussed the elements that signal the rise of fascism.  One of these is the Great Lie Theory.  This theory posits, as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

“The driving force of the most important changes in this world had been found less in scientific knowledge animating the masses but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drives them forward.”  

To achieve this fanaticism and hysteria, Hitler argued that leaders must tell “Great Lies,” then reduce them to incessantly repeated slogans that serve to make truth and facts irrelevant.

I also explained that the primary obstacle to the success of “Great Lies” resides in intellectuals who have done the research and/or possess the knowledge to expose such lies.

But while intellectuals can be effectively censored in repressive governments, the question remains how, in a nation like America with its supposed freedom of press and speech, “Great Lies” (such as “Stop the Steal”) can be obsequiously accepted by millions of people to the point that thousands of them naively believed that storming the Capitol would result in the restoration of their messiah Donald Trump and earn them his unending veneration, when all they really found was jail cells, criminal charges, and abandonment by their faux deity.

Two television shows perhaps revealed the answer to this mystery.  The first was the legal drama Bull.  In a recent episode, Bull knew that one of the members of the jury had made up her mind about the guilt of the accused, and that no amount of evidence was going to change that.

He called this phenomenon Belief Perseverance.  Fortunately, new evidence came out about the accused’ innocence, that caused the case to be dismissed before the jury had a chance to deliberate, leaving this juror to sit in stunned silence after recognizing the potential injustice she could have caused.

An episode of the recent reboot of the show Leverage (now entitled Leverage Redemption) took this phenomenon a step further.  In what was termed the Backlash Effect, members of the Leverage team were compelled to deal with a client who, even when presented with proof her beliefs were wrong, only became more ossified in her convictions.  As one of the characters explained (in perhaps a thinly veiled reference to Trump) when you call a con artist a con artist, some people just believe in that person even more.

But regardless of whether you call them Belief Perseverance or the Backlash Effect, the danger these phenomena create is pervasive.

In today’s America, there are an inordinate amount of narcissistic and sociopathic people masquerading as politicians, pundits, and journalists who view these phenomena as smooth pathways to votes, ratings, and profits.  From laws created due to imaginary voter fraud to buzzwords like “Critical Race Theory” being used to ban discussions about America’s legacy of racism, these vultures trumpet everything from the myth that Trump will resume the presidency in August, to conspiracy theorist-based election “audits,” to “indoctrination task forces,” and then laugh in secret as they fatten themselves on donations and taxpayer dollars, and/or at how easily the gullible will swallow their scams.

Tragically, while the Internet did not create Belief Perseverance or the Backlash Effect, it certainly has served to heighten their influence.  What was once dubbed the “Information Superhighway” has actually become the “Misinformation Superhighway.”  In the past, when news outlets were limited to antenna television, radio, and printed paper, people, unless they ignored these outlets completely, could not help but occasionally stumble upon material they disagreed with.

But today, like in a buffet, people can pick from an almost infinite number of channels, websites, videos, podcasts, etc., that say only what the consumer wants to see, hear, and/or read.

What is most despicable about this is that many of these sites have the audacity to claim they are presenting “news.”

But think about this for a second.  Why would a news site find it necessary to advertise itself as “conservative” or “liberal” if it was simply presenting the news?  

For example, in a hypothetical headline all too real in America, if a mass shooting killed seventeen people, that is a hard fact; thus, all news outlets should report it as such.  But when this headline transmutes into a bunch of talking heads immediately pontificating about the pros and cons of gun control, then it is no longer news but opinion.

To avoid misunderstanding, I’m not saying that gun control isn’t a relevant topic to be debated.  I’m only saying that such debates are not news, and it is fraudulent for any outlet to present them as such.

The term “news” carries with it an intrinsic meaning that people are being presented factual information, not the unhinged rantings or great lies of some self-serving demagogue.  Those who doubt this should note that almost all responsible newspapers, both print and digital, have clearly labeled “OPINION” sections to inform consumers when they are reading an author’s beliefs.

Therefore, it is essential for laws to be passed in America that prohibit any type of media outlet from using the word “news” when it strictly presents opinion.  For those hybrid outlets, I believe that such laws should require them to inform their audiences when they have ventured from news into opinion or vice-versa.

Will this eliminate Belief Perseverance or the Backlash Effect?  Not completely, but it might reduce the number of people susceptible to it.

And for those who continue to subscribe to these phenomena, just remember that even if faith can move mountains, it doesn’t mean the mountain won’t eventually drop on your head.

 

 

David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru

Читайте больше на https://english.pravda.ru/opinion/117347-lies_news/

 

by Ryan Matters

 

According to research done by We Are Social, the average internet user spends over 6 and half hours online every day.

The internet is both a blessing as a curse. On the one hand, it gives us access to knowledge and technology that improves our lives, but on the other hand, it’s an addictive and dangerous mind-control tool that can be exploited to influence your choices and manipulate your thinking.

The COVID pseudopandemic has seen internet censorship rise to an unprecedented level. The controllers and their minions are scrambling to silence anyone who dares to question the efficacy of vaccines or the existence of Sars-Cov-2.

Let’s recap: In the space of a few months, thousands of YouTube channels and millions of Facebook posts have been deleted. The former president of the United States’ Twitter account was removed, and, Greenmedinfo, a site that aggregates research on natural remedies, had both their Facebook and Instagram accounts deleted losing over half a million followers.

LinkedIn also joined in on the action by deleting the account of Dr. Robert Malone after he questioned the safety of the mRNA vaccines, the technology for which he himself played a huge part in creating.

Parler was removed from the internet and so was the website of America’s Frontline Doctors after they endorsed non-agenda-approved treatments to combat COVID-19. More recently, in a move that’s disturbing yet predictable, Facebook has begun sending users creepy messages relating to “extremist content”.

So content that goes against the mainstream agenda is either censored or outright deleted. We know that. But what about the content that goes against corporate interests but isn’t quite insidious enough to be removed? What does Google, the largest search engine in the world, processing over 40,000 search requests per second, do about such content?

The first thing to understand about Google is that it’s more than just a search engine. Google develops and maintains a network of applications that all work together to collect, analyze, and leverage your data. Each application feeds data into the next, forming a global chain of information exchange.

For example, Google’s driverless car initiative powers Google Maps, which in turn powers Google’s local listings. It is this network effect that has made Google such a powerful and unrivaled force in the search engine space.

As a search engine, Google decides what information you see and what information you don’t. It goes without saying, but any tool with such power needs to be responsibly managed and repeatedly scrutinized.

Anyone who chooses to use such a tool should also be aware that they are seeing the internet through a lens created by Google’s mysterious algorithms and the information they’re receiving doesn’t necessarily come from an objective or neutral source.

Google’s ability to affect people’s thinking was demonstrated by the work of Dr. Robert Epstein when his team found that Google was profoundly influencing the results of elections. Epstein writes that:

Our research leaves a little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidates by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session. […] Whether or not Google executive see it this way, the employees who constantly adjust the search giants algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day.”

It would also appear that Google is inherently biased towards pro-drug, pro-vaccine, Big Pharma medicine. In 2019, the search engine made an update to its algorithm that just so happened to shadow-ban health websites not affiliated with billion-dollar corporates.

The websites affected included GreenMedInfo, SelfHacked, and Mercola.com. Some of these sites lost over 90% of their organic traffic, overnight. 

When searching for most health-related topics on Google, the first page is almost always filled with content from websites like WebMD, whose history is filled with conflicts of interest and open collaborations with Monsanto, Merck, and other corporates.

In 2017, the search engine blacklisted naturalnews.com, a natural health advocacy organization that reports on controversial health topics including vaccine safety, GMOs, and pharmaceutical experiments, de-indexing over 140,000 of their webpages.

In a 2019 article, the founder of NaturalNews, Mike Adams, had this to say about Google (emphasis in original):

Make no mistake: Google is pro-pharma, pro-Monsanto, pro-glyphosate, pro-pesticides, pro-chemotherapy, pro-fluoride, pro-5G, pro-geoengineering and fully supports every other toxic poison that endangers humankind.”

Google’s ties to Big Pharma are well-known. In 2016, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, partnered with GlaxoSmithKline to create a new company focused on research into bioelectronics – a branch of medical science aimed at fighting diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body. GSK also works directly with Google thanks to a deal between the two companies that allows GSK full control over the data that they use. What data? Whose data? That isn’t disclosed.

Alphabet is also heavily invested in Vaccitech, a UK-based vaccine company founded by researchers at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, the Vatican (vaxxican?) of vaccine research.

Finally, it has recently come to light that Google’s charity arm, Google.org, provided funding for research and studies carried out by Peter Daszak and his charity, EcoHealth Alliance – the same charity that previously worked with the Wuhan lab involved in so-called ‘gain of function’ research.

These conflicts of interest alone should call into question the search engine’s ability to provide an unbiased view of health content on the internet.

Google’s “autocomplete” algorithm is another source of manipulation that works to affect people’s perceptions about the danger of vaccines and the efficacy of natural treatments.

For example, if you type “vaccines cause” into Google, the top suggestion is “vaccines cause adults”. I mean, seriously? In contrast, if you search “Chiropractic is”, the top suggestions are “quackery”, “pseudoscience” and “dangerous”.

Autocomplete is supposedly based on data collected from real Google searches, especially common and trending ones. However, data from Google trends clearly show that ever since 2004, “vaccines cause autism”has been searched far more times than “vaccines cause adults”, and “Chiropractic is good” has received a far higher popularity score than “Chiropractic is quackery”, the top suggestion.

A similar trend can be observed for terms such as “supplements are”, “GMOs are”, “glyphosate is”, “organic is”, “homeopathy is”, and “holistic medicine is”.

Looking at the way Google favours Big Pharma content, it’s reasonable to suspect that their “data lakes” are being poisoned. In fact, this was confirmed in 2019 when former Google software engineer, Zack Vorheis, leaked 950 pages of internal company documents providing evidence that Google was shaping election results, implementing stealth censorship programmes, and maintaining undisclosed blacklists.

Google’s algorithms are shrouded in mystery, based on black-box machine learning models that few people understand.

Machine learning models must be “trained” and as long as Google feeds them data to say “non-drug medicine is bad, Big Pharma is good”, the algorithms will continue to re-bias the internet in that direction, altering people’s perceptions of natural health and presenting drug-based medicine as the shining light in a dark world filled with invisible enemies.

When it comes to psychological manipulation, Google’s “partner in crime” is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

If you’ve ever searched for anything on the internet, you’ve likely seen Wikipedia show up towards the top of the search results. When it comes to questions without any commercial impact, such as “What’s the capital of Turkey?”, Wikipedia does a pretty good job.

But when it comes to multibillion-dollar industries, things get a little murky. Big corporates have big pockets and they aren’t opposed to the concept of “pay-to-play”. This was highlighted in 2012 when British PR firm, Bell Pottinger, was exposed for its involvement in manipulating Wikipedia entries for paying clients.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is no saint, either. In 2008 he used the platform as his personal relationship break-up tool by updating his relationship status on his Wiki entry before telling his girlfriend. And in 2010, he was embroiled in a Wikipedia pornography-removal scandal that saw him “voluntarily” relinquish certain editing and admin privileges.

One of the industries where Wikipedia’s bias is most noticeable is healthcare. In an article for the Orthomolecular News Service, Howard Strauss, Grandson of Max Gerson, MD (the creator of the Gerson cancer therapy) states that:

This writer and many others in the field of alternative medicine and natural healing have experienced Wikipedia bias personally when contributing well-documented, carefully researched articles to the site, only to have them be radically altered and deleted, by anonymous “editors,” then being banned from further editing or contributions. This is impossible to reconcile with a free flow of information.”

And this can be verified as Wikipedia keeps a public record of all edits made to an article over time. He goes on to comment on the history of Wikipedia and states that:

At first, it was interesting to see uncensored information flow through the site, and even contribute to it. Then corporate America realized that Wikipedia, and similar sites, were distributing information they had carefully and thoroughly suppressed in the media, and set about correcting that omission. Soon, Wikipedia entries about natural healing, holistic medicine, and other subjects began to resemble publicity blurbs from Monsanto, or Merck, or the NIH. Contributors are supposed to be anonymous, “volunteer” editors were supposed to be both anonymous and neutral. But it was clear that for certain sensitive subjects, this was far from the case.”

If you want to see Wikipedia’s bias for yourself, just search for any medical discipline that isn’t drug-based. And if you want to make things really fun, take a shot of whiskey every time you see the word ‘pseudoscience’.

Here are real snippets from Wikipedia entries on alternative forms of medicine and natural healing, taken from the first few sentences of the entry…

• Chiropractic: “Chiropractic is a pseudoscientific alternative medicine…”
• Chinese medicine: “Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a branch of traditional medicine in China. It has been described as “fraught with pseudoscience.“
• Homeopathy: “Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine.”
• Ayurveda: “The theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific.”
• Acupuncture: “Acupuncture is a pseudoscience.”
• German New Medicine: “Germanic New Medicine (GNM), also formerly known as German New Medicine and New Medicine, a system of pseudo-medicine.“
• Functional Medicine: “Functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses a number of unproven and disproven methods and treatments.“

The editors display a shocking level of bias by cherry-picking references, many of which are not peer-reviewed or scientific, and make hollow claims which they portray as facts.

The entry on Functional Medicine is particularly difficult to get through. Functional Medicine is a form of medicine focused on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. It often involves treatments to correct nutritional imbalances and gut dysbiosis.

However, the author claims that functional medicine encompasses a number of ‘unproven’ and ‘disproven’ treatments and cites two articles on sciencebasedmedicine.org, a notorious ‘Skeptic’ publication, both written by the same author.

The articles, far from scientific or scholarly, read as opinion pieces written by an MD with a chip on his shoulder, who clearly has no understanding of what functional medicine really is. The author, Dr. Wallace Sampson, passed away in 2015. Here’s his author bio:

Retired hematologist/oncologist, presumptive analyzer of ideological and fraudulent medical claims, claimant to being founding editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, and to detecting quackery by smell.”

Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry for the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, says that it is a discontinued medical journal and that it was evaluated at least three times by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for indexing in MEDLINE, but rejected each time. What a shame.

Furthermore, in 2003, a California Appeals Court found Dr. Sampson “to be biased and unworthy of credibility.” Yet these are the kind of charlatans that Wikipedia endorses as “experts”.

Instead of citing ‘quackbuster’ publications written by biased, outdated, and nutritionally uneducated MDs, the editors would do well to dive into Alan Gaby’s Nutritional Medicine (over 16,000 scientific references), or Dr. Alex Vasquez’s Inflammation Mastery. That’s presuming they have the intelligence to read high-level, academic texts, based on real, unbiased science (not opinions).

If I were an editor at Wikipedia, I may choose to rewrite the article on chemotherapy, claiming it is a pseudoscience by citing this 2004 study which found the overall contribution of chemotherapy to cancer survival to be barely over 2%, or this study in Nature Medicine that found chemotherapy to increase tumour growth and survival.

Wikipedia made its stance on alternative health quite clear in 2014 when founder Jimmy Wales ridiculed an 8,000-signature petition on Change.org calling for a fairer discussion of alternative and complementary medicine on the encyclopedia. The petition stated that:

As gatekeepers for the status quo, they [Wikipedia] refuse discourse with leading-edge research scientists and clinicians or, for that matter, anyone with a different point of view”

Instead of recognizing his lack of expertise in the area of healthcare and re-evaluating the fraudulent and dubious wiki entries, Wales demonstrated his lack of awareness by stating that:

What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of ‘true scientific discourse’. It isn’t.”

Quite frankly, it’s not surprising to hear such a response from the man who heads an organization that serves the interests of the Big Money Machine and its quest to dumb down the populace. As Dr. Vasquez puts it, in a recent critique of a New York Times propaganda piece on the “danger” of nutritional supplements to fight coronavirus:

The scaffolding of our institutionalized ignorance requires structural support from publications and organizations that pretend to inform and empower us while simply leaving us dumber and weaker than before.”

So when did Wikipedia become an extension of Big Pharma? The truth is that the health section of Wikipedia was commandeered by a bitter group of skeptics who live within their own, egoic constructs of reality and health.

This anti-health movement ramped up in 2006 when Paul Lee, then the listmaster of Quackwatch, made a forum post inviting skeptics to come forward and begin writing content on Wikipedia about natural and complementary health topics.

Quackwatch, a “Skeptic” website aimed at “debunking” and smearing non-drug medicine, was founded by Steven Barrett, an unlicensed MD who failed his psychiatric board exam, and has authored zero published research (at least I haven’t been able to find any). During a court proceeding, he admitted ties to the AMA, the Federal Trade Commission, and the FDA (though his sources of funding are likely far more expansive).

Lee was in full violation of Wikipedia’s neutrality policy and knowing this, he stated:

Any coordination of efforts should be done by private email, since Wikipedia keeps a very public history of every little edit, and you can’t get them removed. We don’t need any accusations of a conspiracy.”

Needless to say, a coordinated effort over private email IS a conspiracy. And not a very sophisticated one at that.

Then, in a move demonstrating both the organization’s ethical and moral standards, Wikipedia made Paul Lee a senior editor with special rights and privileges.

The influence that both Google and Wikipedia have is astonishing when you consider that Google receives more than 1 billion health-related questions per day. How many of those people have turned away from effective treatments due to the information Google fed them? How many people wrongly believe that COVID vaccines are safe effective?

But who do we blame for the increasing power and influence that Google and Wikipedia hold? Perhaps we are to blame. Blindly trusting in “authorities” to have our best interests at heart is the kind of infantile thinking that got us into this mess.

As the number one visited website in the world, Google controls ~90% of global search traffic. Our minds, health beliefs, political stances, and world views are inseparably linked to information we read on the internet and neither Google nor Wikipedia is an objective source for this information.

It is time that we take responsibility for our own health. We have to develop the ability to read and assess health knowledge objectively and intuitively.

Do you suffer from depression? Maybe you need to get your vitamin B12 or vitamin D levels checked, maybe you need to cut out processed and neuroinflammatory foods from your diet.

The internet is not a miracle worker, The internet doesn’t know what’s best for you, no one does. Your body is different from mine. Treatments that work for you may not work for me. But as long as we learn to listen to our bodies, to understand our own, unique inner landscape, we can begin to seek treatments and practitioners that truly make a difference.

The lesson is this: You are the authority. Read, learn, understand, and don’t take anything at face value. We need to learn to develop our intuition in parallel with our critical thinking skills. 

Discernment is our secret weapon. We’re fighting an information war. Arm yourself with knowledge and be free.

Ryan Matters is a writer and free thinker from South Africa. After a life-changing period of illness, he began to question mainstream medicine, science and the true meaning of what it is to be alive. Some of his writings can be found at newbraveworld.org, you can also follow him on Twitter and Gab.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2021/07/12/how-google-and-wikipedia-brainwash-you/

 

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