By Alice Kim –
One prolife group noticed a dramatic change in their web traffic after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was leaked to the news media. Once decided, the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling left to the states the decision to allow, restrict, or ban abortion.
Prior to the leak, a Life Issues Institute video was receiving 10,000 views a day, but after the leak it got 2,500 views a day. With the brouhaha generated concerning abortion, those views should have increased, not decreased, according to Brad Mattes, president of the group.
He charges Google with intentionally suppressing web traffic to Christian and conservative websites. (God Reports is also a victim of this suppression campaign, which started in the run-up to the 2020 election.)
“Any tolerance that Google had for pro-life messaging (previously) was kicked to the curb,” said Mattes. “They couldn’t tolerate any message that abortion is not good for the women of America.”
Life Issues Institute is a pro-life organization that aims to win over pro-choice people with compelling videos.
“We knew that we had a window of time when people were more focused on abortion,” Mattes said. “We put together a program focused on those individuals who were not pro-life but could be persuaded.”
The video began with significant views but then dropped off sharply. “It was the most blatant example of censorship,” Mattes says.
This is not the first time Google’s algorithm has been manipulated to reduce exposure to conservative ideas. Operation Rescue’s fact sheet was on Google’s page one in search results until May 2017. After that, it dropped to the bottom of the listing on page two, when people search for “Abortion in America.”
Changes to Google’s algorithm can affect any business, but when Christian and conservative websites are downgraded and obscured among a slew of liberal websites, it’s easy to suspect intentional manipulation.
The algorithms are set by popularity of the information until a human hand intervenes and changes things. For example, a search at the time of Trump’s first presidency of the term “MAGA” turned up 9 out of 10 negative results; the acronym stands for “Make America Great Again” but if you relied on Google, you would think it meant “Morons are Governing America.”
The tech industry is dominated by non-Christians who have a strong leftist and libertarian streak.
The strike against Life Issues Institute’s video coincides with warnings added on Christian videos about abortion. Even CBN, when it posted a pro-life video recently, got tagged with a link purporting to provide alternative “non-biased medical information” that dressed up abortion nicely.
The extraordinary influence of Big Tech to censor and suppress Christians and conservatives is unnerving because the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans over abortion and other issues is not being contested on a level playing field. The tech titans know they can tilt public opinion whatever direction they want – an enormous power currently unchecked.
If you’ve ever gotten a “451 error” on a website you’ve clicked, the number is derived from Ray Bradbury’s Fareinheit 451, a dystopian novel in which they burn books to suppress free speech. It’s ironic that the engineer at Google who developed this protocol essentially admited they were practicing censorship.
Since George Orwell’s political novel 1984, we have been on guard against government censorship, but we were all wrong: the censorship hasn’t come from government; it comes from people outside government.
When one side of the debate thinks the other side is dangerous and resorts to suppression, we are not far from communism.
If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here
Alice Kim studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy as a foreign exchange student from South Korea.
