Originally published at Café Babylon on Oct. 6, 2014.   It seems even more relevant today than it did then.  It’s longish, so hang in there if you're able. In these post-‘Capitol’ social media de-platforming days, remember that (Chrome) Google algorithms suppress websites from the conservative and religious right to the ‘subversive left (wsws and popular resistance, for instance).  And Google bought Youtube in Oct. of 2006 for a paltry $1.65 billion.

If you haven’t read it and seen the captioned photos, you’ll love ‘Google Is Not What It Seems’ by Julian Assange, an extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks, wikileaks.org

Also see Scott Ritter’s ‘By banning Trump and his supporters, Google and Twitter are turning the US into a facsimile of the regimes we once condemned’, RT.com, Jan. 9, 2021  Two excerpts:

“Digital democracy became privatized when its primary architect, Jared Cohen, left the State Department in September 2010 to take a new position with internet giant Google as the head of ‘Google Ideas’ now known as ‘Jigsaw’. Jigsaw is a global initiative ‘think tank’ intended to “spearhead initiatives to apply technology solutions to problems faced by the developing world.” This was the same job Cohen was doing while at the State Department.