Some radical writers under the leadership of British Poet, Stephen Spender were aghast at the brutal suppression of the works and oeuvres of Soviet dissidents which were banned from being read by the public in national interest.
This was at the height of the cold war and the tension between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics (USSR) and Spender, a Brit, who was obviously an ally of Uncle Sam felt the compulsion to greatly protect free speech and freedom of expression. This led to Spender spearheading the launching of The Index on Censorship magazine in 1972 to protect the aforementioned hard-won liberties sturdily built on the blood of freedom fighters in the days of yore which set a precedent.
The Index on Censorship published the works of Soviet dissidents and helped preserve much of the Soviet Union literature, especially in the post-Bolshevik revolution era.
The magazine also played a great role in the democratization agenda of most African nations as it ensured that the works of pro-democracy writers and activists who were killed, maimed, detained, or forced into exile were published.
It is with heavy sadness that I read the story of the censorship of a clip of an interview posted on YouTube owned by Google granted by Ruth Institute President, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse who spoke with prominent biologist, Dr. Joel Brind for violating the streaming platform’s “medical misinformation policy.”
An official statement from YouTube read: “YouTube does not allow content about abortion that contradicts expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO) and poses a serious risk of bodily harm or death,” the platform wrote in a message informing the group about the removal of its video.
Lifesite News reports that Ruth Institute is an international organization dedicated to the promotion of the family and rejection of the so-called sexual revolution, specifically through conducting interviews and sharing research on the subject.
The pro-life group did not receive a strike against its channel because “we know you may not have realized this was a violation of our policies,” according to YouTube.
The video features Brind – a retired biology and endocrinology professor and medical researcher – discussing his nearly 30 years of research on the connection between abortion and breast cancer. He stated that for almost 70 years some link between the two has been known by scientists, part of which relates to sex hormones that change during pregnancy.
The clip is only about three minutes of a full-length interview and has been reposted to YouTube with the words “abortion” and “breast cancer” blotted out by noise to adhere to the platform’s policies while also spreading the message that it had been suppressed.
Lifesite News further reported: “Dr. Brind isn’t some crackpot fulminating on the internet, but a serious scientist engaged in rigorous research,” Morse continued. “No matter. YouTube doesn’t want the public to know about the abortion-breast cancer link, so it shuts down any discussion of the matter, under the guise of protecting the public from ‘misinformation.’ How convenient.”
But this is not the first time that YouTube has censored the exact interview it suppressed last week. As noted by Morse, the full interview was posted to the Ruth Institute’s channel on October 1, 2021, only to have it removed for allegedly violating the same policy on July 26, 2022.
More than 20 years ago, Brind was respected as an expert on the abortion-breast cancer link. Even then, he argued that 26 of 32 international studies and 12 of 13 U.S. studies on the connection pointed that women who have abortions face a greater risk of developing breast cancer. In 2011, Brind considered a 1996 meta-analysis that saw a 30 percent higher risk of breast cancer diagnosis after having an abortion and concluded that abortion has led to 300,000 more deaths from breast cancer since Roe v. Wade legalized it nationwide.
Two years later, after the release of another study pointing to the same conclusion, Brind expressed concern that highly populated countries were seeing an increase in breast cancer when the disease had once been extremely rare. In more recent years, similar results of related studies have been shown through additional research, including the risks of taking contraception and cross-sex hormones.
A 2017 study found that taking hormonal contraception over a course of 10 years increases the risk of developing breast cancer by 38 percent. Additionally, LifeSiteNews reported in 2019, gender confused men who take female hormones are 46-times more likely to develop breast cancer while women taking male hormones face a risk of the diagnosis almost 60 times higher than if they were not taking the drugs.
This is a gargantuan tragedy as it is extremely worrisome that Google – an American-owned company located in the world’s largest bastion for free speech, can surreptitiously take us to the dark and gory days of life in the Iron Curtain where there was a Big Brother control. More worrisome is the reality that Google is the world’s largest search engine and so it raises a critical question: can we – especially conservatives wholly trust it especially as it seems to have a bias for promoting liberal ideologies in its search algorithm.
Conservatives in the media I keep on saying and will reiterate it for the umpteenth time must copy their liberal competitors and find ways to be more commercially savvy and business minded as the ancient approach of going cap in hand begging for donations is clearly not sustainable.
There is no harm if conservatives in the media could put together a star-studded business proposal for the creation of a rival search engine that will in one sentence – showcase the truth.
What Google just did is akin to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s viral Ted Talk Speech ‘The Danger of a Single Story’.
I once again challenge all media-interested conservatives globally to come together even with their widow’s mite to effectively tame the behemoth of Google in the public interest.
