Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has tussled with Google's ad program for years. Google first threatened to pull its ads in 2014, when WND was heavily into Colin Flaherty's race-baiting, but it agreed to shut off Google ads to those race-baiting articles. Now it apepars Google has finally had enough, and WND can't stop whining about it. An anonymously written Aug. 6 article served up some details:
Google, the dominant advertising service on the internet, stopped serving its ads on WND's homepage, apparently because the tech giant deemed many of the news site's stories and opinion columns to contain "unreliable and harmful claims."
Google has an "autocrawler" that searches for violations of its "community standards" and disables its ad server on offending websites.
After having blocked ads to individual stories for the past several years, Google stopped serving ads to WND's homepage altogether earlier this month under a new policy that assesses a site's general content.
Google has not specified the content that triggered the move, but in the past it has flagged WND articles that countered the media narrative on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the offending articles was an Aug. 2 opinion column by Wayne Allyn Root titled "The vaccine isn't working, but the gravy train is." In it, Root backs his claim by citing a Bloomberg report that there were more than 110,000 cases of "breakthrough COVID-19," meaning cases in which people tested positive for COVID after having been vaccinated.
WND, needless to say, is misrepresenting the contents of Root's column, pretending a relatively uncontroversial claim is the sticking point. In fact, the thesis of Root's column is that it's "a great big lie" to claim that unvaccinated people are driving the current surge in COVID cases. Root touted that "In Singapore, 75% of the new COVID-19 cases are among the vaccinated" -- but that claim lacks context; it omits the fact that cases among vaccinated people are not severe, while unvaccinated people are catching severe cases of COVID. Rootalso ranted that President Biden let refugees from countries where the purprotedly "live among filth and squalor" and "bring with them Third World illness and disease" into the U.S., meaning "These are the dreaded superspreaders." That is not true.
The anonymous writer made sure not to mention the voluminous amount of COVID misinformation WND has published since the pandemic began, which would more than justify Google withdrawing its ads from WND.
Then the whining realy ramped up:
Google no longer is flagging WND's homepage, but the news site's advertising team has decided to move on from Google and rely instead on supportive advertisers.
WND founder and CEO Joseph Farah commented on Google's "community standards."
"I don't accept Google's parameters, because they do violence to the First Amendment. Period. End of the story," he said. "We live in America where the First Amendment is still the law of the land."
Google, which for years has set its algorithm to push WND way down in its search results, has suppressed, de-monetized and branded many of WND’s biggest news stories as "dangerous, derogatory or shocking content."
The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, which advises all the major tech platforms as to who is "hateful and extremist," characterizes WND – which is Christian and conservative in worldview – as an "extremist group."
WND then served up a revisionist take on the 2014 race-baiting that first got it in trouble with Google:
In 2014, Google accused WND of using "hate speech" and threatened to block ads over its use of the term "black mobs" in news stories and columns reporting on a two-year epidemic of racial attacks in the U.S.
Farah said at the time that the Google policy was flawed because it "attempts to censor words and phrases that are truthful and accurate from First Amendment-protected media on the basis of political correctness and faulty algorithmic methodology."
Two years prior, WND began investigating and reporting on a spree of unprovoked attacks by groups of blacks on non-black victims, spearheaded by accounts compiled by journalist Colin Flaherty, author of "White Girl Bleed A Lot." The book had been endorsed prominently and repeatedly by celebrated black scholar Thomas Sowell for connecting the dots between hundreds of incidents taking place in cities across the country. Flaherty's reporting also first identified the phenomenon known as "the knockout game," in which groups or individual black people targeted non-black victims for unprovoked attacks designed to knock them unconscious with a surprise blow to the head.
"The answer to violence, whether motivated by race or some other rationalization, is not to turn away from it and hide it from the public, but to expose it to the light of day," Farah said.
"WND made a determination to do that after examining the overwhelming evidence presented by Flaherty in his research. In response to that kind of reporting, police departments and public officials – both black and white – across the country have acknowledged the pernicious ramifications of what’s happening and taken action to prevent others from being hurt. What Google is doing, after the fact, is ignoring hard facts and assigning insidious racial motivations for this kind of courageous reporting."
That's not really what happened. Flaherty was so obsessed with this "black mob" race-baiting that even white people and animals were deemed to be members of "black mobs." As we noted at the time, WND admitted it had published 670 articles referencing "black mobs," yet it never covered other crime to that extent. Additionally, that Google crackdown had its desired effect: WND distanced itself from Flaherty, and while WND continued to race-bait, it was a little less blatant.
The article went on to play victim by rehashing WND's claim that "YouTube, which is owned by Google, de-monetized WND after it posted a single video defending 'MyPillow guy' and Trump supporter Mike Lindell." But the likely real reason YouTube demonitized that video is because it included a clip from the podcast of Steve Bannon, who has been banned by YouTube for making false claims about election fraud.
WND could edit Bannon out of the video and get itself re-monetized, but that wouldn't fit its victimization narrative ... just as it continues to do the same things -- misinformation, conspiracy theories -- that have brought it to its current point of near-insolvency.
