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Google to Censor 'Fake News'
by Robert Parry via jess - Consortium News Saturday, Nov 19 2016, 10:53pm
international / prose / post

(Trust Google, sure can't!)

Google is at it again, working hand in glove with government to participate in a new internet information-suppression trick to censor and eliminate what it calls, "Fake News." This is an almost comical endeavour from a government and 'real' news outlets that lied about WMD in Iraq, the Washington orchestrated coup in the Ukraine, etc etc. However, Google is ready to run with this absurd big brother tactic to control information on the net by labeling it, "Fake News." Be aware people. I would add that Google is not the only good search engine out there, or that Facebook's compliance is primarily to secure the CEO's bottom line. Anyone attacking free speech is mortally afraid of something -- could it perhaps be the Truth? People are sick and tired of the FAKE news and raw propaganda issuing from the mainstream media, not from alternative sources.

Ministry of Truth

So, who are the “responsible” journalists who should be anointed to regulate what the world’s public gets to see and hear? For that Orwellian task, a kind of Ministry of Truth has been set up by Google, called the First Draft Coalition, which touts itself as a collection of 30 major news and technology companies, including the Times and Post, tackling “fake news” and creating a platform to decide which stories are questionable and which ones aren’t.

Formed in June 2015 and funded by Google News Lab, the First Draft Coalition’s founding members included Bellingcat, an online “citizen journalism” site that has gotten many of its highest profile stories wrong and is now associated with NATO’s favorite think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Despite Bellingcat’s checkered record and its conflicts of interest through the Atlantic Council, major Western news outlets, including the Times and Post, have embraced Bellingcat, apparently because its articles always seem to mesh neatly with U.S. and European propaganda on Syria and Ukraine.

Two of Bellingcat’s (or its founder Eliot Higgins’s) biggest errors were misplacing the firing location of the suspected Syrian rocket carrying sarin gas on Aug. 21, 2013, and directing an Australian news crew to the wrong site for the so-called getaway Buk video after the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

But like many news outlets that support establishment “group thinks,” Bellingcat wins widespread praise and official endorsements, such as from the international MH-17 investigation that was largely controlled by Ukraine’s unsavory intelligence agency, the SBU and that accepted Bellingcat’s dubious MH-17 evidence blaming the Russians.

If such a Ministry of Truth had existed in the mid-1980s, it might well have denounced the investigative reporting on the Contra-cocaine scandal since that was initially deemed untrue. And if “Minitrue” were around in 2002-03, it almost surely would have decried the handful of people who were warning against the “group think” on Iraq’s WMD.

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https://consortiumnews.com/2016/11/18/what-to-do-about-fake-news/