“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Conservatives have another good reason to distrust Google, the world’s most powerful search engine: The Chinese Communist Party is filling your search results with lies about itself, conspiracy theories about the U.S., and the CCP’s line on COVID-19.
Those are the results from a new study performed by a liberal D.C. think tank—and the details will make you question everything you read on the world’s top search engine.
The study’s authors spent four months studying 12 search terms on five search engines: “(1) Google Search; (2) Google News; (3) Bing Search; (4) Bing News; and (5) YouTube.”
Why CBD Sometimes Doesn’t Work [sponsored]
They found that, if you’re looking for information about China, they’re going to give you the Chinese Communist Party’s side of the story.
Take Xianjiang, the province where the Chinese government has been accused of huddling more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs into reeducation camps. The CCP claims these are like summer camps, which teach patriotism, loyalty to country, and work skills.
Survivors and outside observers say it’s a brainwashing facility that forces the inmates into slave labor. Prisoners there are also reportedly subjected to torture, sexual harassment, and inhumane treatment 24 hours a day. There are even allegations of harvesting the body parts of prisoners and selling them on the open market.
But when you search Google, you’re almost definitely going to read Chinese propaganda, according to a study from the liberal Brookings Institution.
For Google, in 88 percent of cases, at least one of China’s state-run or state-backed news outlet will show up in the top 10 results related to the topic. For YouTube, it’s 98 percent.
“Put another way, major American tech companies are allowing Chinese propaganda cutouts to amplify Beijing’s lies,” said the conservative website The Washington Examiner in an unsigned editorial. “U.S. companies must stop acting as useful idiot puppets for America’s most dangerous adversary. If CEOs are unable or unwilling to moderate President Xi Jinping’s propaganda, Congress should take action in law.”
Cholesterol drug linked to memory loss [sponsored]
It’s even worse: The more you’re looking for news, the more likely you are to get nonsense.
“Both news search (Google News and Bing News) and YouTube search are much more likely to disseminate Chinese state media than web search,” the report says. “Chinese state media accounted for roughly 22% of the observed pages and 25% of observed channels in search results for queried topics related to Xinjiang and the origins of the coronavirus on news and YouTube searches, respectively.”
China also spreads conspiracy theories that try to pin the origins of the COVID-19 virus on the United States or Japan. Although the virus may well have been created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which specializes in experimenting with transmitting the coronavirus), the CCP has tried to say the virus came from a U.S. military institution or a Japanese chemical left behind after World War II. Searches for this issue “regularly returned [China’s] state-backed content,” the study found.
To critics who say they’re hyping their findings, the researchers say they’re actually downplaying the facts, which are even worse than they let on. The website doesn’t include the fact that China partners with (read: pays) multiple sites to repost Chinese media stories. “Because of China’s extensive content hosting and influencer arrangements, our research likely underestimates the prevalence and prominence of Chinese state media in search results,” they write.
This should concern everyone on the planet, since almost all internet traffic goes through Google. Even with other alternatives multiplying regularly, a full 92-and-a-half percent of all internet searches use Google.
The study’s authors point out that all this is happening even though “Russian state media have been de-amplified or banned by multiple Western social media platforms.”
Sponsored: Easy Tongue Secret Delivers Perfect Sleep
Everyone knows you can’t trust the Chinese Communists. We also assumed we couldn’t trust Google—but now we know it for a fact.
If you want facts about how China wants to destroy your country, how it’s murdering its own people, or how America’s most well-connected families—including the First Family—are playing footsie with Chinese Communist leaders, don’t leave the search at China’s whim. Go directly to The Horn and get the facts each and every day.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”