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Tuesday, September 10th 2019 at 12:00 pm

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Originally published on www.johnweeks-integrator.com

The blog post to which my attention was called was entitled When Big Brother Went High Tech. The news from energy medicine author Lynn McTaggert jerked attention of the integrative community to a story I’d long anticipated: Google’s censors turned their attention to the still wild political-economical-medical frontier of “alternative medicine”. Osteopath and internet businessman Joseph Mercola reported that 99% of the traffic to his sometimes pugnacious mercola.com “natural health” website was killed. “Integrative medicine” was not spared. Visits to the much more tame Dr. Weil site from that field’s godfather dropped 66%. In an August 2019 e-blast to his list of Minnesota holistic practitioners on Google’s incendiary actions, an integrative leader of 40-years Bill Manahan, MD writes: “I think you will find it pretty scary for those of us in the integrative, alternative, and functional medicine fields.”

It is. McTaggert’s story is a doorway into a sectoral and global hell. The McTaggert piece first reached me from a leader at Consciousness and Healing Initiative for which I service on a communications team. Other readers of the Integrator newsletter also tipped me. The news is stark. Changed Google algorithms cut in half traffic on her e-magazine site What Doctors Don’t Tell You. She reported Mercola’s even more devastating losses while also sharing Mercola’s belief that Google’s additional manual manipulation of search targets cut down additional traffic where the algorithms hadn’t already driven in the knives.

Why? Via associative laws – such as Google’s investment in pharmaceutical solutions – McTaggert puts big pharma at the calamitous keyboard. Manahan’s e-blast shares that others like author Christiane Northrup, MD agree. McTaggert calls it “a massive concerted effort by Big Tech and giant corporations to censor the information you are allowed to see.

“The ability to create such damage to choice, to freedom, and to health has multiple causes. The most powerful has absolutely nothing to do with alternative, complementary or integrative medicine, per se. Nor is it connected to a site’s takes on vaccinations, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, the existence of the Biofield or of energy medicine “woo” at any level of science. Nor does it have to do with the internet era, though the web certainly metastasizes its effect.

https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/self-interested-whims-oligarchs-google-and-facebook-kill-access-alternative-and-i

“Google has deliberately placed a systematic penalty on the vast majority of health sites to make sure that they don’t show up on the first page of search results. “

From greenmedinfo.com

Something interesting happened in the health world recently, and I haven’t seen any news stories about it.

Google is deliberately censoring all “non-mainstream” health websites that have gained any kind of serious traction, without exception.

They’re not showing information that users want to see, or respecting what they’re searching for. Instead, Google is taking it on themselves to decide what health information you’re allowed to see, and changing your search results from behind the scenes.

I know what you’re probably thinking: this sounds like a conspiracy theory.

But that’s exactly why I wrote this post. If you look at the evidence I present in this post, you’ll quickly see that this is no kooky conspiracy theory — it’s real, and barely even a secret.

Now, when I say “censor,” I mean that Google has deliberately placed a systematic penalty on the vast majority of health sites to make sure that they don’t show up on the first page of search results. SelfHacked and Examine are just two of the sites that have been caught up in Google’s latest “blacklist” — but we’re also far from the only ones.

You can easily see this in action for yourself. In order to find SelfHacked content on Google now, you have to add “SelfHacked” to your search term or else it won’t show up. This isn’t the case if you try the same searches on Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo, where we still rank highly for many health-related search terms. (DuckDuckGo has additional benefits in that they don’t track you and serve much fewer ads, by the way.)

This isn’t just a change that affects service providers like us — these changes are also going to have a major effect on everyone’s ability to find accurate, scientific, and useful health information online.

Google as the Thought Police

Google has become the Thought Police for health content.

There’s been a lot of news about big tech companies de-platforming and censoring controversial figures.

We also know about Google firing James Damore and their ideological echo chamber.

There have been rumors that Google is working with China, even though they won’t work with the United States military. Peter Thiel recently wrote a piece in the NY Times describing their willingness to work for China, but not the US.

We also know that Google is moving away from their “don’t be evil” mantra, which is quite a low bar to begin with, if you ask me.

But what isn’t getting coverage is that Google has started censoring high-quality health content — even content that is backed up by research published in conventional medical and academic journals.

Some people have suggested that Google is in the hands of Big Pharma. They cite evidence of Google’s partnership with GSK, and their willingness to share their data and forge business partnerships with them.

Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I don’t subscribe to Google being bought out by big pharma — or at least, I don’t believe that’s their main influence.

I chalk it up to Google’s ideological echo chamber.

The question is, who gave Google the authority to say that SelfHacked and the hundreds of other sites they are censoring are not reliable websites?

For example, Google’s John Mueller keeps claiming that Google ranks sites that display “expertise,” “authoritativeness,” and “trustworthiness” (E-A-T). He has even suggested that website owners like me can improve our site’s rankings by asking other experts to weigh in on whether our site has these characteristics, and adjust it accordingly until relevant experts approve.

The thing is, no matter who I ask, they’ve all told me that SelfHacked is already authoritative, trustworthy, and displays expertise. You can look at any of our posts and judge for yourself.

https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/google-taking-censorship-health-websites-next-level?fbclid=IwAR1GTMntDWA3hmYEMY3-hjm9p1XR0Hwiq85ZWBiSRu4lQja0fkfpM_HdZkc

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