@Eva @DefendTruth I believe you might be looking at this from the bottom up instead of the top down. Google is a -search engine-. I know that sound "obvious" but that's my point. Search engines are the dominant way people find things online. I know that sounds "obvious" too, but keep both points in mind for a moment.

This ex-Google engineer's big revelation is well known. Google already freely admits they do this and for a good reason. They black-list sites that sell and trade in universally illegal material such as drugs, unregistered guns, and pornography involving minors.

Sites and "marketplaces" for such things still exist, it's just nobody will ever "see" them on Google. Most of the other big search engines do the same. They argue that they don't want to facilitate crime or be a party to it.

Since these "Big Tech" search engines are private companies, they have the right to decide what appears on the results they provide

This ex-Google engineer is talking about.what happens when the "we don't want to be part of that" argument is expanded to politics.

Suppose all the rampant anti-Semitism that's tolerated on GTV finally triggers Google's "hate site" algorithm and GTV gets black-listed. Entirely possible since this is one of the only supposedly-Catholic sites that tolerates such content and it has one of the biggest audiences.

Imagine GTV gets wiped off Google's search results entirely. For most of the online world, GTV will simply cease to exist just as certain "chan" boards do already. People who already know about GTV will still find it, but new people won't.

GTV won't be "more" important at all. Site traffic will drop. Readers and viewers will drop waaay down. If this is universally implemented for politics, the visible "mainstream" internet that most of you see will become a smaller and far more left-wing environment

The same applies to what @DefendTruth is discussing. There are hundreds of sites that offer file/ video hosting besides, say, everybody's fave YouTube. Seriously, if somebody gave you a dollar for each one, you could pay your month's rent, even in the Big Apple. :D I'm not talking "porn", either. There are tons of news sites out there that allow, even encourage, users to post raw unedited war and crime footage.

Everybody's talking about the latest Muslim jihadist beheading of a British soldier? The full body-cam footage of Officer Blue in a gunfight with DeThug Washington? Not just the part shown on MSNBC? Those are the sites that will host that kind of video content.

They already -are- outside of Big Tech's sovereignty just as GTV is. At the same time, they are dependent on Big Tech's search engine referrals just as GTV is.

GTV is more a news portal than social media, anyway, notably in terms of its audience and how it's used. People who want private free social media services or hosting already use one of the "alternatives" out there or, if they're a bit more cautious and criminally minded they "hijack" an existing forum that provides such services for their users.

They join, say, a board dedicated to poodles. The subject of the board is irrelevant, they're interested in the board's PM/ chat features. Then they use the poodle board just like Facebook. They log onto "poodle-fancy" and chat and load photos and everything else among their own group-whatever kind of group that is.

On bigger boards offering these kinds of services, GTV included, one of the not-discussed jobs of the "super mods" and lower-tier admins is monitoring the PM/ chat traffic.

This is why I'm always telling people, "Be careful what you say in PM. Be careful what you post. Private Messages are not private."

Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. A Catholic board like GTV shouldn't allow itself to get used unwittingly by, for example, European Muslim radicals. They're one of the biggest culprits for PM abuse mostly because they're just clever enough to come up with such an idea and just stupid enough to imagine no one else has thought of it before.

My point here, and in my original post, is "Big Tech" black-listing sites doesn't make the sites they black-list any more important and it doesn't make the sites not-yet-blacklisted more important either because that can change in an instant.

Speaking bluntly, with the kind of garbage GTV already allows as "news", it's probably inevitable. It won't have anything to do with Big Tech having an "anti-Catholic bias" or getting "anti-Christian", either. It'll be thanks to the entirely un-Catholic and non-Christian bigots allowed on this site..