Mick Meaney
(RINF) – ‘Fake news’ is a term designed to fool the weak minded into believing the corporate media are the only reliable sources of information.
You and I both know that is a total lie.
Since you’re reading this, you already know that we’re living in a totalitarian society where anything that does not sit inside the tightly controlled margins of ‘acceptable debate’, is painted as an enemy of the people.
You might recall that late last year, following Hillary Clinton’s defeat, Google announced they were going to war against supposed ‘fake news’ websites.
This week I received an email from Google Adsense informing me that my account would be disabled if I didn’t comply with their demands to censor this website.
They demanded that I remove an article that exposed Israel’s corruption and crimes against humanity (there are hundreds of articles like this here).
In fact, it was merely a portion of an article with ‘read more’ link to TruthOut.
So I was faced with a tough decision:
Comply; delete the offending article, keep earning from Adsense and hope they don’t come back and demand that I remove more.
Or I could refuse to be bullied and lose 80% of RINF’s revenue.
So I decided to put Google to the test. I TEMPORARILY removed the article and told them it was gone. I waited patiently to see what their next move would be.
Then the next day, as I expected, I received another email telling me to delete a second article. This time it was an article about Donald Trump, written by Eric Zuesse.
Again, Google claimed the article had been ‘scrapped’ – code for stolen from somewhere else.
We have a strict editorial policy here, we never republish articles in full unless we have explicit permission or right to do so. In many cases an author will submit an article directly.
If we don’t have permission to publish an article in full, then a small portion of the article will be published and a ‘read more’ link to the source will be added.
This is called ‘content curation’ and is a widely accepted practise.
Eric publishes articles here himself, under his own RINF author account. Of all the places that article has appeared across the Internet, it was published on this website FIRST. Their advanced algorithm is smart enough to know when the article was published.
And of course I reinstated the article that triggered their initial censorship demand.
My choice is now; let Google dictate what information is acceptable, or significantly reduce the amount of time I spend devoted to RINF.
There are other ad networks out there, I’m currently using Media.net – but none can compete with the earnings of Adsense, it’s significantly higher than any other network. That’s why it’s so popular.
Either way Google wins, but they’re NOT going to control what kind of information we publish here. I refuse to be bullied by Google and the threat of losing my income isn’t enough to pressure me into compliance.
Maybe that’s the nature of independent news; we are a target, something else that needs to be manipulated and controlled – because we’re a barrier between the propaganda laced mainstream media, and an informed population that won’t accept it.
Google have an agenda. They outright admitted it and now they’re enforcing it.