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Anti-Corporate Voices On Both Right And Left Claim Google Censorship

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Anti-corporate voices across the ideological spectrum are claiming that Google is attempting to silence them for their political positions.

Barry Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation — a think tank funded by Google — says he lost his job this week as a result of his research critical of Google, which Lynn says should be considered a monopoly.

“Every day I see people waking up to the power of Google, Facebook and Amazon. We have to do something as a people, we have to do something through our government and address the power of these companies,” Lynn told The Guardian. “The number of congressmen and others making statements on Capitol Hill about this is growing very rapidly. The number of businesses who are saying that something must be done about the power of these companies and the way they use their power.”

On the far-left, the World Socialist Web Site is claiming “a 70 percent drop in referrals from Google searches” and that the site’s “news articles and essays on politics, history and culture are being systematically blocked.” The group claims a Google algorithm change in April led to its content being blacklisted.

In an article published Wednesday, the WSWS claimed that “the top 45 search terms that formerly led readers to the WSWS are now blocked by Google.” The socialist website says Google is wrongfully censoring them under the guise of fighting fake news.

Also this week, a right-wing website called The Liberty Conservative claims to have received a letter from Google threatening to suspend advertising revenue from the site unless it pulled down an article written by an organizer of last month’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

“Yesterday morning, we received a very bizarre letter from Google issuing us an ultimatum,” Shane Trejo wrote in an article posted to The Liberty Conservative on Wednesday. “Either we were to remove a particular article or see all of our ad revenues choked off in an instant. This is the newest method that Big Brother is using to enforce thought control.”

Trejo claimed the article “contained no offensive content” and “was merely distinguishing the many differences between the alt-right and literal Nazis.”

The site often runs alarmist articles about the influence of corporations in American politics. (RELATED: Google And Facebook Co-Sponsoring Protest Of Pro-Life Women’s Health Care Clinic)

Trejo said the site “had to comply with Google’s strong-arming tactics for the time being” as a result of “financial constraints.”

“An independent publisher such as The Liberty Conservative needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive,” he explained.

Conservative website PJMedia first highlighted Trejo’s claims in an article later featured on the Drudge Report.

Google has yet to return TheDC’s request for comment for this article.

The latest accusations of censorship follow Google’s controversial firing of an engineer, James Damore, for writing a memo criticizing Google as an “ideological echo chamber.”

“My firing neatly confirms that point,” Damore wrote in a Wall Street Journal column following his firing.

“How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?”