Ritchie Alan on the Agenda
Howya friends. Little bit of news.
I've a couple of mates who work for Google. They both must remain anonymous of course. They drip feed me bits of information from time to time. Around four years ago, one of them told me that the demonetisation of alternative news channels would become standard. He was right as I learned when my original YouTube channel, which had nearly 100,000 subscribers, was deleted for no reason, three years ago.
I heard from him this morning. He told me two things. He said that when the covid vaccine is ready, or shortly before then, Google/YouTube is planning to take down thousands of channels that have traditionally hosted open discussion around vaccine safety. They will do this he said, in tandem with Facebook and Twitter. According to him, discussions between all three have already taken place. He reckons it'll be the biggest culling to date, of content creators and independent vloggers/commentators.
While this may be unsurprising, it is important news and I trust him implicitly. He also said that it is his belief (and I've said as much myself) that Russian interference claims are nothing but a smokescreen for mass censorship. They (the royal they), know damn well that the Russians are not responsible for spreading anti-vaccine information online, pro-Brexit propaganda or information about 5G. They KNOW he said, that these initiatives are grassroots organisations, set up by genuinely concerned citizens, but that the easiest way to legislate for them and ultimately to censor them, is to blame Russia. Problem Reaction Solution. He's right. Again I have said as much many times.
Last year, Professor Julian Petley, one of the UK's finest journalists and teachers, told me before an interview that he was worried about me. He'd been attending journalist conferences and one or two conferences on fake news. Julian is an unswerving proponent of free speech. He said my name was coming up a lot and that there may be some movement against me or the show. When I told him that I wasn't working for anyone and was broadcasting from a home studio rather than a radio station, he was somewhat relieved, but nonetheless told me to watch my back.
This morning, my Google mate said that The RA Show is on a shortlist of programmes to not only be removed from YouTube (which I don't care about at all), but also to be removed from Google search results too. He said the RA show replacement channel, which has 31,000 subs, has in reality many more, but they're not being counted. Worse still he said, the viewing numbers are fixed so that less than one in ten views are shown. The point of this he went on, is to dissuade people from watching, people apparently being more inclined to watch content that's showing hundreds of thousands of views.
Now I couldn't give a fiddlers about YT viewing figures or subscribers as you well know. The bulk of my audience listens live as it is a live radio show, or they grab the podcast from iTunes, Spotify, Podomatic etc. And viewing/listening numbers say nothing about the quality of a show in any case, but it's important to note this, cos they ain't just doing it to me.
Asked if there's any concern among his fellow employees about what is happening, my mate said no. Or at least nobody has said anything. Maybe they are like him, worried about the prospect of losing a tech job, being labelled a troublemaker and struggling to get another one. Share this widely as your favourite Youtubers need to know that this mass cull is coming to coincide with the arrival of the covid-vaccine, so that they can back up their videos, something which they should be doing, but many don't. Anyhow, thanks for reading. I'm on air at 5.
Loads to do. Speak later.
From Pepe Escobar
HOW TO BE TOTALLY
"DISAPPEARED" BY
GOOGLE
Apparently even if their name is as much as spelled out here it rings all sorts of algorithm alarm bells.
But you will know what I'm talking about. A very successful independent news and analysis site that also republishes my columns - and columns from a crack team of writers - has now been "disappeared" from ANY Google search results.
In early May, the site had already been purged. Facebook blocked their content and Google de-ranked all their pages.
The Lords of Silicon Valley are getting pretty desperate, aren't they?
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