Breitbart gets its hands on an internal Google document talking about how the company intends to act as a “good censor” of news and information. From the Breitbart report:

An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the “American tradition” of free speech on the internet is no longer viable.

Despite leaked video footage showing top executives declaring their intention to ensure that the rise of Trump and the populist movement is just a “blip” in history, Google has repeatedly denied that the political bias of its employees filter into its products.

But the 85-page briefing, titled “The Good Censor,” admits that Google and other tech platforms now “control the majority of online conversations” and have undertaken a “shift towards censorship” in response to unwelcome political events around the world.

Examples cited in the document include the 2016 election and the rise of Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.

Responding to the leak, an official Google source said the document should be considered internal research, and not an official company position.

The briefing labels the ideal of unfettered free speech on the internet a “utopian narrative” that has been “undermined” by recent global events as well as “bad behavior” on the part of users. It can be read in full below.

Don’t believe Breitbart? You can read the entire document at the end of the report.

The reader who shared the story with me writes:

I’m not surprised. Don’t know how much you’re on Twitter, but their power over the algorithm has become frightening. Reporting on it as a user and not a designer means we’re interpreting our experiences and can easily become unreliable narrators, and Google and Twitter use that edge to paint critics as paranoid. But I check Twitter every morning and several times throughout the day; the Twitter trends use to have a real wild West feel, and my guess is that back around May they made some new tweak to the algorithm that let them completely control what gets through. They’ve added the Moments feature to push LGBT-advocacy stories all day everyday. When you click on a trend like Kavanaugh, the first “top” tweets which come up are all liberal blue-checks. It’s completely unbalanced.

The same thing has happened with Google, though to a less obvious degree. But they filter news stories as well. They’ve removed sites like InfoWars from as many platforms as possible; that’s the thin edge of the wedge, though. What happens when The American Conservative and The Benedict Option are considered unsafe topics for people to look into? And what happens when our major distributors of information bury stories they don’t like?

I’ve been apocalyptic about their control for some time, but the precision I think they’re going to achieve before there is any sort of pushback is frightening. We can’t build the Benedict Option if people can’t talk about it, or if we all think we’re talking to someone but are actually in a soundproof room.

The reader followed up:

Interestingly, while trying to see if there was any place besides Breitbart running the story, Eric Weinstein, the brother of Bret Weinstein from the Evergreen College debacle, was talking about it. He shared this link to the memo:

https://www.scribd.com/document/390521673/The-Good-Censor-GOOGLE-LEAK#from_embed

But there’s a number of commenters who won’t read it because Breitbart leaked it. Just as Center for Medical Progress’s videos on Planned Parenthood were ignored as soon as some PR hack came up with the word “edited” to dismiss the content. Wikileaks faces silent ostracism as well: there’s just too much info discrediting the mainstream narrative, and because there’s so much of it it’s easy to just ignore it all, double-down on the narrative, and run character attacks on the outlets still nuts enough to go after you.

I don’t see how to get through that brick wall they’re building; it’s a heck of a lot stronger than any wall Trump wanted to build.

Please read the Breitbart story, and/or the Google memo. It’s important. Do you want Social Justice Warriors — the same people who drove James Damore out of the company for questioning “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”? — deciding what counts as true and false, real and unreal? It seems to me that if the Republicans hold on to Congress this fall, they had better wake up and make an all-out push to pass laws protecting free and independent access to media. I have not paid much attention to this issue. Looks like I had better start. You too.