Tell Me More About How Google Isn’t Part Of The Government And Can Therefore Censor Whoever It Wants?
By Caitlin
Johnstone, Caitlin Johnston , March 7, 2018
When you
tell an establishment Democrat that Google’s hiding and removal of content is a
dangerous form of censorship, they often magically transform into Ayn Rand
right before your eyes.
“It’s a
private company and they can do what they like with their property,” they will
tell you. “It’s insane to say that a private company regulating its own affairs
is the same as government censorship!”
This is
absurd on its surface, because Google is not separate from the government in
any meaningful way. It has been financially intertwined with US intelligence
agencies since its
very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA
for mass surveillance, pours massive amounts of money into federal
lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy
relationship with the NSA and multiple
defense contracts.
“Some of
Google’s partnerships with the intelligence community are so close and
cooperative, and have been going on for so long, that it’s not easy to discern
where Google Inc ends and government spook operations begin,” wrote journalist
Yasha Levine in a 2014 Pando Daily article titled “Oakland
emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex“.
“The
purchase of Keyhole was a major milestone for Google, marking the moment the
company stopped being a purely consumer-facing Internet company and began
integrating with the US government,” Levine wrote in a recent blog
post about his book Surveillance Valley. “While Google’s public
relations team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of
geeky altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the
Lockheed Martin of the Internet Age.”
And now we learn from
Gizmodo that Google has also been helping with AI for the Pentagon’s
drone program.
A Google
spokesperson reportedly told Gizmodo that the innovations it is bringing
to the Defense Department’s Project Maven are “for non-offensive uses
only,” which is kind of like saying the beer kegs you delivered to the frat
house are for “non-intoxicating use only.” The DoD and its drone program exist
to find and kill enemies of the US empire, and Google will be helping them do
it.
“The department announced last
year that the AI initiative, just over six months after being announced,
was used by intelligence analysts for drone strikes against ISIS
in an undisclosed location in the Middle East,” reports The
Intercept on this story.
Google is
not any more separable from the US government than Lockheed Martin or Raytheon
are, yet it has been given an unprecedented degree of authority over human
speech and the way people communicate and share information. Would you feel
comfortable allowing Northrop Grumman or Boeing to determine what political
speech is permissible and giving them the authority to remove
political Youtube content and hide leftist
and anti-establishment outlets from visibility like Google does
How is
this a thing? How is it considered acceptable for a force which has intimately
interwoven itself with government power to censor and manipulate political
speech in ways the official government would never be allowed to?
The
notion that Google is a private company, separate from the government and thus
unburdened by obligations of free speech, is not a legitimate one. You don’t
get to create a power system where money translates directly into political
influence and privatization creates symbiotic relationships between
corporations and government agencies, create a beefed up Silicon Valley giant
with research grants and contracts to prevent any competition from ever having
a chance against it, involve that Silicon Valley giant in the agendas of the US
war machine after you’ve helped it dominate the globe, and then legitimately claim
it’s just a poor widdle private business that shouldn’t be subject to the legal
limitations placed on the US government.
If you
believe the government shouldn’t be able to regulate speech, then there’s no
legitimate reason to believe that Google should be, because Google is part of
the government. You shouldn’t want there to be a loophole where government
power can get around constitutional restrictions on its ability to silence
dissent by funneling all speech into institutions it created and collaborates
with and then quash anti-establishment voices under the pretense of protecting
the public from “fake news” and “Russian propaganda”.
There
needs to be some sort of measure in place which protects the public from such
manipulations. Either remove corporate power from government power or
acknowledge that they are fully meshed and expand constitutional protections to
the users of any media giant which has enmeshed itself in government power.
Pretending corporate power and government power are separate when they are not
while exploiting that inseparable symbiosis to silence political dissent is not
acceptable.
Government
should be a tool of the people to help the people, not a tool of the powerful
to oppress and exploit the people. Something’s going to have to change, and
we’re going to have to stop asking nicely.
