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Originally Posted by Pugchief
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Frustrating? Yes. But criminal? Hardly. There really hasn't been a time in our history when information presented to Joe Public, at least to a certain extent, HASN'T been sifted or cherry-picked by media to present a certain face. Search "yellow journalism" for just one example of such activity going back to the late 19th century. But that is just one example among many others, and the yellow journalists of that time faced plenty of opposition from news sources printing opposing views.
The issue here however is not so much that a Google search is apt to yield results heavily skewed in a certain direction (that has been known for quite some time) but that a monopoly on disseminated information means that it has become progressively harder and harder to find information on the internet that might contradict the stuff most readily available in a Google search. This seems to be the case most often when it relates to "social" issues. Try searching Google for any information that contradicts the accepted line
du jour on just about any social issue and this will become obvious. The problem is that, when you're the only game in town, you can pretty successfully slam the door on any info. that you might not want Joe Public to see.
Google of course is not the "only game in town" when it comes to the availability of information on the internet. But it is far and away the largest. In 2018 Google handled no less than 90.8% of all internet searches
(Jeff Desjardins, "This Chart Reveals Google’s True Dominance Over the Web", visualcapitalist dot com, April 20, 2018) and I doubt that that dominance has shrunk in the past five years. Additionally, Google owns and controls the content of Youtube,
"the second biggest social media in the world, with over 2.7 billion active users" (demandsage dot com, February 2023 statistics). Finally, Google and FaceBook, the LARGEST social media platform on theplanet, which though ostensibly independent of one another, have formed a "partnership":
("Facebook and Google announced that they will be partnering to bring Facebook's retargeting platform, Facebook Exchange, to Google's Doubleclick." (bigfootprintdigital dot com, Oct. 25, 2022). All this means that Google, through its search engine and control over YouTube alone, controls what is available to nearly 3 BILLION people worldwide and if one adds in its influence over FaceBook, their dominance is huge--AND scary--AND undeniable.
I have begun collecting print books relating to issues, primarily social, that offer more complete pictures of those issues than what is available online. These will go to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren when that time comes. But even this, due to the surging popularity of e-books, is becoming harder and harder to accomplish. And how long will it take for even these books to be deemed "undesirable" and worthy of censure/destruction?
I don't know. Time will tell, I guess, and there seems to be less and less of that all the time.