Google suppresses AFLDS

Months after an exposé on Google’s manipulation of search results, the mega-corporation has openly informed America's Frontline Doctors (AFLDS)  of tactics to reduce AFLDS’ online exposure.

Initial denial

Longstanding rumors of Google’s political bias led to their CEO’s public denial of the charges in September 2018. As CNN reported, “Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded to reports that some staff had discussed tweaking search results to show a pro-immigration bias. ‘We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda,' he wrote in an email to Google employees.”

Secret algorithms
The Daily Caller reported, in April 2019, though, that, “Google does manipulate its search results manually, contrary to the company’s official denials, documents obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller indicate.”

In August 2019, Project Veritas followed up with its own story on Google’s secret censorship of conservative content in an article entitled, “Google ‘Machine Learning Fairness’ Whistleblower Goes Public". 

In the article, whistleblower Zachary Vorhies described how “Google allegedly called the police to perform a ‘wellness check’ on him" after suspecting his involvement in the release of “hundreds of internal Google documents", including “a file called ‘news black list site for google now’. The document, according to Vorhies, is a ‘black list,’ which restricts certain websites from appearing on news feeds for an Android Google product.”

An entire folder of the leaked documents fall under the heading, “censorship” and a document entitled “Fringe ranking/classifer: Defining channel quality” actually includes the following screenshot showing its “example ranking of various news sites,” with obvious implications for their ranking in search results.

From “of course not” to “of course”

Appearing to have denied an obvious fact until well after it was already well known and then declaring it to be true in a matter-of-fact fashion, Google has sent AFLDS an “Alert Message,” pictured below, which states,

“1 issue detected

"Pages affected by manual actions can see reduced display features, lower ranking or even removal from Google Search results.

“Detected Issues

“Medical Content

“Description

“Your site appears to violate our medical content policy and contains content primarily aimed at providing medical advice, diagnosis or treatment for commercial purposes. Nor do we allow content from any site that contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence based best practices. Learn more.

“Affects

Affects all pages.” [Emphases added].

Demands

Google makes no pretenses about their expectations from AFLDS. They offer only one option for responding to this alert: To delete content from the AFLDS website and then click the “Request Review” button which is prefaced with the question, “Done fixing?” 

Consequences

Until AFLDS “submits” to Google’s self-censorship demands, the search giant plans to continue censoring the AFLDS site by reducing display features, lowering its ranking or even removing it from Google Search results.

Ambiguous 

Google fails, in its alert, to define content ”that contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence based best practices.” In a time when celebrities and computer programmers are allowed to express their views on virology, but actual doctors and scientists are censored, including the hundreds of doctors comprising AFLDS, such clarity is elusive.