NLPC Blasts Google, YouTube for Secrecy Over Gov’t Censorship Requests

On Wednesday, National Legal and Policy Center presented a resolution at Alphabet Inc.‘s annual shareholder meeting that would require the company to produce a semi-annual report that itemizes requests it has received from the federal government to censor information on its Google and YouTube platforms.

The company’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on pages 85-86 in its proxy statement.

Speaking as sponsor of the resolution was Paul Chesser, director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. A transcript of his three-minute remarks, which you can listen to here, follows:

I’m Paul Chesser, director of the Corporate Integrity Project for National Legal and Policy Center.

 

A public service announcement for my fellow shareholder proponents:

 

Beware when a company opposes your resolution by using the term “robust” to describe its existing disclosures.

 

When you see that word “robust,” you can be sure the company is gaslighting you, as Alphabet is doing in its proxy response to my organization’s proposal.

 

Our proposal requests a detailed report that itemizes requests from U.S. government officials and agencies, details the nature of each request, and tells what Google’s decision was about the request.

 

Alphabet’s proxy response is to refer you to its misnamed “Transparency Report,” which tells us nothing, other than to enumerate how many takedown requests they’ve received from various governments around the world.

 

The only reason we won’t get the kind of report my organization requests is because Alphabet’s majority voters, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, don’t want you to know how much the Biden administration conspires with Google and YouTube to censor users of their platforms.

 

MSNBC’s newest personality, former White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, confirmed that in a press conference last year.

 

She said almost one year ago, “We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team.”

 

This was after Biden’s Surgeon General said that “tech and social media companies must do more to address” alleged health misinformation.

 

As we all know now, it was the Biden administration, and agencies like the CDC and NIH that were the dis-informers, by lying to the public about COVID and its origins; by pushing shutdowns despite their destructiveness; by ignoring evidence about the ineffectiveness of masks and the failed vaccines; and by censoring information about COVID that they did not approve of.

 

For example, it’s clear Google censored search results for the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which opposed the prevailing and destructive COVID-19 policies pushed by the Biden administration, and which has now been signed by almost 1 million medical and health professionals.

 

Google almost certainly censored the Declaration at the behest of the NIH’s Francis Collins or Anthony Fauci or an ally of theirs, not because of any serious scientific rebuttal to the Declaration, but because they were personally offended that their policies were being criticized and disproved.

 

I can’t think of a more catastrophic failure of public policy and guidance for the public than the federal government’s COVID mandates, and both Google and YouTube validated the authoritarianism behind these edicts, by shutting down all dissent – much of which could have improved outcomes and saved lives.

 

Google and YouTube removed information the Biden administration does not want you to access, because they do not believe in free speech.

 

They are morally bankrupt partners in a public policy crime. No wonder why they want to keep it all secret.

Read NLPC’s shareholder resolution for the Alphabet Inc. annual meeting here.

Listen to Chesser’s three-minute remarks in support of the proposal here.