You get highly ideologically filtered results whenever you use the Google search engine. The tech behemoth’s latest casualty is Dr. Roy Spencer, one of the scientists responsible for generating the global satellite temperature average (UAH) featured by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Demonetized
(Photo Illustration by Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Recently, Spencer published a message saying he had received an email from Google that his blog had been demonetized, meaning he can no longer receive ad revenues from Google AdSense. The reason? “Unreliable and harmful claims.”
Is Spencer peddling conspiracy theories, denying the greenhouse effect, anti-vaxxer material, or similar ideas? Not at all. He is a respected and widely cited scientist and a significant contributor to the IPCC, which accepts that computer climate modeling is a valid enterprise. He just doesn’t believe in the most outlandish catastrophic warming scenarios pushed by doomsters.
For this sin of not being a radical environmentalist who believes the world is ending, Google has demonetized him and labeled him harmful and unreliable. Spencer says he is not losing any sleep over lost ad revenue because it amounted to rounding errors in his income. Nevertheless, it raises the issue that Google, which has no expertise in climate science, puts itself above one of the leading climate experts in the world.
DeSmog
This behavior is no fluke. Other scientists who thought they were safe from persecution have found out they will be canceled if they do not abide by the catechism of radical environmentalism. One famous example is the Danish scientist Dr. Bjørn Lomborg. He is regularly labeled a “climate denier” in the media, despite consistently stating that he accepts IPCCs publications slavishly as truth. The sin that earned him the label “denier” is demonstrating that even if everything the IPCC says is true, the future is not bleak, and there are better ways to spend money than on attempts to stop climate change.
If you Google Lomborg’s name, the fourth entry is the radical environmentalist site DeSmog dedicated to smearing and canceling outspoken scientists who do not accept climate catastrophism. Google Roy Spencer and DeSmog is the third entry. Alexa ranks DeSmog as the 340,000th website globally, which probably means that Google has actively chosen to elevate it in their search results.
Sleeping Consumers
Although a Pew Research survey shows that 39% of consumers want freedom of information to be protected by Big Tech, even if it means that false information can be published, they are not yet ready to translate this belief into action. Google holds more than 85% of the search engine market share in the U.S. despite alternatives that do not censor information ideologically, such as DuckDuckGo.
It takes less than one minute to change the default search engine in the browser. So far, few people are willing to make that effort to become less exposed to the Big Tech ideological filter. Until they choose to change their behavior, Google is free to cancel science.
~ Read more from Caroline Adana.
