[retortio]

> "On the recent protests, ZeroHedge published an article claiming that protests were fake, while The Federalist published an article claiming the media had been lying about looting and violence during the protests, which were both included in the report sent to Google."

It's a perfectly reasonable argument to make that many mainstream media outlets were downplaying the amount of rioting and looting going on relative to peaceful protests.

Yet somehow it's now WrongThink to even discuss how media may be shaping perceptions through biased reporting?

And now NBC's news-vigilantism unit can tattle to Google and shame them (and advertisers on the Google ad network) into pulling ads because two websites had the audacity to question NBC's narrative?

A healthy society functions best when there are checks and balances on all sides but unfortunately there are some who are using the recent protests and BLM to push Orwellian control of culture and media that is frankly quite disturbing.

As an aside, what exactly is "far-Right"? I've never seen any non Leftist publication described as "Right" so I'm not sure what adding "far" does other than function as a smear on anything Right of the mainstream Left.

[noble_pleb]

The bigger question to ask here is where is the Google Adsense competitor? Google may have some favorite political inclination and being a private firm also has the right to deplatform anyone. But why has no Adsense alternative emerged even after so many years? Do people just enjoy Google's monopoly in advertising?

[retortio]

Monopolies are able to exist precisely because it's hard to challenge them.

That's why people saying "the free market will sort things out" with regard to free speech are deluding themselves. I'm not willing to wait 50 years for the free market to sort itself out while the ideal of free speech is torn asunder by private corporations.

[mikece]

It's actually quite easy to start a Google Ad Words competitor... it's even possible to make money. But when Google addresses the threat by offering a huge buy-out, saying "No" is very hard (and that's setting aside the question of possible investors taking the decision out of your hands).