Ernest Foy of Montreal, Quebec, is like many forty-year-olds in Canada. He follows the law and generally trusts the government and media, but since the pandemic the easy going family man has started questioning the narrative. And after helping his young son with a school assignment, he’s discovered that it’s getting more difficult to be a critical thinker using search engines like Google.
Foys awakening happened when he was helping his 5th grade son research a civics assignment last year. “The assignment was to define an anti-vaxer,” explains Foy. The father was shocked to discover that the term now included people who were against mandating vaccines. “That was my family, who believe in vaccination yes, but as a choice, not as something that should be forced on people by politicians.”
The well read Montrealer knew from the beginning of the vaccine push in his dystopian socialist hellhole nation of Canada that something was wrong with the whole thing. “Especially when you know that the so-called COVID vaccine was an experimental gene therapy that turns out to have injured many otherwise healthy people. If they wanted to take it, fine, but the mandates were wrong. That doesn’t make me anti-vax! Everything used to be so clear, but now it seems like I’m being told how to think,” rails Foy to GWU!
BREAKING THE NARRATIVE
And he’s not wrong! Google claims it wants you to be a critical thinker and in an effort to make you one, they are doing the critical thinking for you with their new tactic of so-called ‘Prebunking.’
The stated goal of Prebunking is to spread good truthful information and teach people the skills needed to identify fake news and hoaxes. This, claims Google is done through short videos artificially boosted to the top of your social media feeds to combat disinformation and misinformation. The topics that the corporate media giant says there is a problem with include; COVID, climate change, election results, Ukraine, trust in democratic institutions, and authoritarianism. The problem? People are starting to think for themselves after doing their own research.
Google, along with fellow Internet creeps Facebook, YouTube and TikTok claim that their new form of online censorship is purely altruistic and actually cuts down on the need for them to remove problematic content from their platforms, by making sure no one ever thinks about creating it.
“Prebunking itself isn’t the problem – depending on who’s doing it,” says one Cambridge researcher who worked on the early concept of it at the Ivy League university while it was still in development.
“Consumers of information have to think critically about where that content came from, is it verifiable and a whole host of filters. Whether it’s coming from a corporate news source or a government you have to analyze the motive. And the motive of big, controlling governments and corporations is always to get bigger and have more control,” says the researcher who left the project in disgust when the pro-corporate and government undertones started to take over due to pressure from its industry and government sponsors.
What troubled her was that the methodology of prebunking was never tested on its use for good rather than evil. “Our corporate research sponsors weren’t interested in helping grandma identify an online scam for example or warn young people about the dangers of the serious problem of online transgender contagion.”
She says that Prebunking was never intended to be a “one sided, top down dialectic” but that’s exactly what it became shortly before it left the research stage and was unleashed into the real world.
After Ernest Foy stumbled into the issue of prebunking with his son’s homework on anti-vaxers has found more examples of the big tech censorship tactic while searching for what the war in Ukraine was really about. “All I could find,” he says “Was Newsweek stories about how evil Putin is. It wasn’t helping me make a solid stance on the war.” (Wait till he researches the definition of a women!-ed)
WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED GOVERNMENT VIDEO PROGRAMMING: ‘PREBUNKING’
The program was first rolled out in Poland last year where Google released a video combatting what it considered anti-Ukrainian refugee sentiment. GWU! Entertainment Editor CJ Byner has reviewed the clip, giving it two thumbs down and zero likes.
“Fade in: close up on a dumb white single male sitting with his friends in a trendy Polish cafe absorbed with ‘fake news’ on his dumbphone. We pan out to see the concerned faces of his wiser and better looking friends (nice job central casting!). Looking frustrated, dumb white guy blames Ukrainian refugees for taking up all the apartments. His shocked liberal friends (not classically liberal, new liberal, you know – sanctimonious authoritarian bootlicker style) point out that the source of the information is suspect,” says the former WGA picket captain.
“PLOT TWIST: They tell him he is engaging in ‘scapegoating’ while the problem is more complex than what the dumb friend read on Polish InfoWars. The blasé brushing aside of the real and legitimate social, economic, and infrastructure issues of 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees being dumped into the country is neatly tied up in 55 seconds. Now that’s what I call a production!”
And our redacted researcher agrees with Byner. “While scapegoating is never helpful, the ad shifts attention away from real concerns that are happening. This guy just wants to find an apartment. Preferably one where he won’t get stabbed by an undocumented Ukrainian for his hat.”
REMEMBER, MY ONLINE DISINFORMATION KEEPS YOU SAFE, YOUR ONLINE TRUTH INFORMATION IS BANNED!
“The real goal is censorship dressed up as fact checking,” she continues. “It’s all about making social media sites more safe for advertisers who don’t want content on vaccine injuries and other anti-corporate messaging taking over traditional platforms that have always been considered ‘safe’ for advertisers.”
But the true believers of prebunking ideology claim that the social science they’re prescribing is for your health, like a vaccine.
Sander Van Der Linden, a social psychologist at Cambridge University, says the tactic is a ‘psychological inoculation.’ The self described ‘expert’ on online information continues that “just as vaccines expose people to a weakened dose of a virus to try to help prevent future infection it works the same with pre-bunking.”
Byner says that Van Der Linden is pushing bad medicine. “Great comparison, expert. Because we all know how well vaccines worked at stopping the spread!”
Google has stated it plans to release a new series of prebunking videos in Germany and India, citing the success of the program in Poland.
For Ernest Foy, however, he’ll continue trying to find ways to get the real story, which is proving harder and harder to do with the advent of prebunking. “Thankfully,” says Foy, “There are still sites like Get Woke Up! that aren’t afraid to tell it like it is.”
