Over 95% of the Internet is Giving Us Bad Information
Happy 4th of July to lovers of free speech
I have to admit, I have always liked the July 4th Independence Day holiday. As a veteran, it gives me pride to be part of my long family lineage of military men that started in The French and Indian War. We are represented in all the wars the US has ever had, including the American Revolution.I personally think the Revolution service was way more important than me fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That war was fought in order to introduce a new form of government that was run by the people rather than monarchs and dictators. The most important amendment is the 1st. This is the one that guarantees free speech and free exercise of religion. Today, both of those are under assault and have been for a while now.
In my opinion and from my generational level, the most important overall issue of the day is the censorship of speech. Without free speech, we have nothing that resembles the country known as the United States. Control of our speech allows us to have the endless wars that I hate. Stopping people from expressing their differences with the government is the worst thing I can imagine. Which is why it is under attack and happening constantly.
There are essentially a handful of companies that control almost everything we see and do on the Internet. I mean, over 95% and closer to 98% of the information received by people are funneled to them and controlled by six companies that all work together in collaboration with the government.
These companies vary slightly in their approaches, yet all compliment each other and all were implicated in the Twitter Files, along with the US government and so-called non-profit and university organizations that are anything but independent (Clemson University, of all places, is one of those organizations).
One reason the Twitter Files is not the biggest story of our time is precisely because of these controlling companies. They don't want you to know what they are doing and how you have been lied to.
No matter how hard we try, it is extremely difficult to get away from Big Tech, which means the news we consume is being pushed to us by them. They control what we see. This includes the search engines and social media of all stripes. Remember that not getting tracked by Google bots doesn't mean you aren't getting tracked by DuckDuckGo bots or that DuckDuckGo doesn't censor its search results. DuckDuckGo isn't, unfortunately, the solution, even if it is better.
Google is insidious and accounts for over 92% of all searches done on the Internet. That scares the crap out of me. And they really aren't even trying to conceal their covering up of some news and pushing false narratives on other topics. Some things you won't even be able to find unless you really dig deep. Here are the numbers on the market share for search worldwide as of June 2023 (source https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share ):
Google: 92.66%
Bing: 2.76%
Yandex: 1.17%
Yahoo: 1.09%
Baidu: 0.84%
DuckDuckGo: 0.51%
Those are some scary numbers, Google essentially owns the Internet across most of the world. Russia and China are the only exceptions. The so-called privacy search engine has less than 1%.
Do people not care or just not know? Plus, to make matters worse, Bing is owned by Microsoft and they are a big part of the censorship-industrial-complex. And DuckDuckGo, for what it is worth, uses Bing for its search results and Yahoo also uses Bing. So, literally 97% of Internet searches are being done by companies in the United States that want to censor what you see and push a narrative that is essentially Democrat establishment.
Yandex is big in Russia and Baidu in China. Makes sense these two countries would have highly controlled search engines for their audiences. Yet, no one realizes how controlled our own (US) search engines are. Home of free speech and all that.
Today is a celebration of the founding of the country devoted to free speech that no longer has free speech and a lot of people don't realize it, yet. And many that do realize it are all-in for the censorship because it fits their narrative. For now.
I will be writing about these themes more, but time to stop this one before I write a dissertation.