I am white. At heart I am a suburban kid.
One of my ex-coworkers is white. At heart he is a country kid.
One of our dear mutual friends, Corey, got engaged earlier this week on Christmas. Even though I love Corey, he is a Man-Whore. He is also white. Here is a very interesting text conversation I had today.
Me: Did you hear Corey got engaged?
Country Boy: To that girl he was dating last year?
Me: I don't think so, I think that was a few girls ago.
Country Boy: Well, God Bless him....it won't last.
Me: Don't be too sure.
Country Boy: Did he find God?
Me: No. It was a engagement/pregnancy announcement.
Country Boy: How pregnant?
Me: According to the post, 8 months.
Country Boy: Is it his?
Me: How the f@#k do I know? Do I look like her gynecologist?
Country Boy: I wonder if it's his.
So, because I have a dark sense of humor, I shot over to Google and entered this in the search engine: BLACK BABY WHITE MOM MEMES
Didn't see anything good in the first batch of searches, so I clicked on IMAGES:
There we go, that's what I was looking for-
Wait a minute...
Is that a Warning Label? That's new. That's the first time I've come across that.
Now we're really off track.
As a free speech site, that Warning Label is a red flag. Did it stop me from sending a meme to the Country Boy? Nope.
Is it Google's job to warn me about "disturbing or hurtful" memes? Uh, no. But you're Google, you can emphasize, amplify, or disappear any information you want. You're a private company, not the US government.
Just don't claim that you do one thing really well (and that's SEARCH) and you don't. Using 10 different search engines, Google was the WORST at finding Beacon of Speech earlier this year. Google took the search engine and politicized it, weighing content based on a geopolitical philosophy that they don't share with the public, That philosophy has to be extrapolated through observations. How can a reporter wade through a nearly infinite amount of information?
Google Maps is the best because it takes you to nearly every road in the world and it's just there. Now there are some roads that are private or gated that Maps can't access, but Google Maps works the way Google Search should.
What if I want to know where imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is?
Boom! Maps just takes me there.
Google Search judges you or doesn't tell you what you want to know. Remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter? It lacked moderation because Musk fired everyone.
Google Search employs plenty of people to fulfill its internal vision. It doesn't want to be a free speech engine, it wants to be the arbiter of Western Values.
Now, fundamentally, should I send mean jokes to my friends? No. But somewhere deep in the bowels of Googles' dungeons, some pinhead has deemed both me and my website as something that's on the edges of polite society.
I better get my ass to church.
They judge me the old fashioned way.