When Cults Become The New Internet Censor – with the help of Google

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

– George Orwell

The all new, bigger, bolder Universal Medicine Accountability, is alive and swinging on WordPress (so bookmark us here), and as we farewell our old Google blogger platform we give a short post mortem on Google’s Esoteric freedom of speech policy that saw most of the content removed from our Australian URL and the UK blog removed outright. Plus a glance at the terms and conditions of our new host.

See also: List of links UM had removed from Google search index for searches for the name ‘Serge Benhayon’. Includes news reports.

Defamation claim or censorship – Universal Medicine’s complaints to Google – includes full copies of the complaints

And 2016: Benhayon’s SLAPP defamation claim made a full 3 years after his legal team’s complaints to Google, and about 250 blog posts later.

After my whinge to several federal parliamentary and senate offices on cults censoring the internet, an official responded by emailing a link to Google’s content policy with a helpful reminder that we’d agreed to abide by it.  The official clearly hadn’t read our content, and how could they, seeing it had been removed?

I replied that we read the policy when we began the blog, we agreed to it and we abided by it too. We stuck to facts, factual analysis and my opinions based on those facts. In spite of my understanding that Google wouldn’t pull content without a court order, as in a court order issued upon a judicial test of the facts, it appears that’s what they’ve done.

I’ll say appears because the only explanation we were given was a series of Blogger take down notice emails, with no avenues for redress or right of reply.

Hello,

Google has been notified that content in your blog contains allegedly infringing content that may violate the rights of others and the laws of their country. The infringing content that has been made unavailable can be found at the end of this message. For more information about this removal and how it affects your blog, please visithttp://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?l=en&answer=2402711.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects at http://www.chillingeffects.org. You can search for the notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page at http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should consult your legal advisor.

Terms of Service: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
Content Policy: http://www.blogger.com/content.g. 

Okay Google, which rights and which laws? What country do you suppose we’re in?

And now that our content is intact here on this blog, if anyone reading, cult included, can tell me exactly where we violated the policy, I’d be fascinated to hear it.

Chilling Effects, a not for profit watchdog service still hasn’t posted the notices for the 50 plus posts removed from UMA. Like us, they’re probably scratching their heads wondering what the..??? How does a cult get content removed from Google sites so easily?

From what I can gather, the Universal Medicine Cult only needed fill in a form.

Maybe they didn’t like us calling them a cult – except that we have at 3 international cult experts we’ve dealt with directly who could stand up in court and present a rock solid case, and a national cult counselling service assisting increasing numbers of ‘students’ to exit. Or maybe the cult reported me for calling the munchkin messiah ‘pervey Uncle Sergey’ for reading my ovaries after I’d asked him not to, making suppositions about my relationships with men from age FIVE, and having adolescent girls stay at his house. Or maybe it’s because I called him a dropkick philistine for his criminalization of music, or a bogan nincompoop, or the messiah of malnutrition for his denigration of food and um, being alive. Or perhaps the cult is citing religious persecution again.

Or maybe it was for taking the opportunity to call bullshit on a variety of propaganda posts, an opportunity the UniMed enemies of free speech deny on their plethora of sites. Unlike our blogs where everyone’s welcome to comment, but the cult members couldn’t withstand the facts.

And if any of the above is deserving of censorship, then Australia ought to be one giant gulag. Google would have to lock up all of us, Serge Benhayon included, for his routine disparagement of pretty much everyone and everything.

What can I say Google? Where’s your spine? And on pulling over 50 of my posts in the absence of a court order, who appointed you judge and jury? How did you go about checking facts? Or are you just kow-towing to the Esoteric goon squad?

Anyway, it’s worked out better for us. Pageviews increased dramatically – the last several posts have had record numbers of hits. RMRC escapades always get a lot of reads, but the exposition of Serge Benhayon’s morbid writings have gone through the roof.

And WordPress has a groovier platform, better formatting and is more user friendly, and I don’t know, their terms of service are clearer with a proper definition of ‘hate-speech’ (unlike Esoteric hate speech which is usually known on Planet Earth as disagreement, or ‘what?’ or ‘no’.) while dispute resolution seems better defined.

…the Content is not pornographic, does not contain threats or incite violence, and does not violate the privacy or publicity rights of any third party;

We strongly believe in freedom of speech. WordPress.com enables anyone to freely express their ideas and opinions, without censoring or endorsing them.

We take our terms of service very seriously and will suspend any sites that are found to be in violation.   By the same token, we will not suspend blogs if they are not in violation of our terms or policies, even if they are offensive or objectionable. We think the right response to bad or offensive ideas is to speak out against them, not to censor them. Instead of asking us to suspend such a blog, please consider either responding in the blog’s comments or on a blog of your own, to set the record straight.

Example:  we don’t suspend blogs for:  describing a negative experience with a business, stating an opinion you disagree with, or using offensive language…

Our Response to Complaints

We review and investigate all complaints that we receive. If we determine that reported content violates our terms of service, our general practice is to suspend the site. We also may contact the site owner to inform them of the complaint.

If we receive a complaint and are not in a position to make a determination (for example whether something is defamatory or not), we defer to the judgment of a court. Please forward any legal process relating to a site hosted on WordPress.com to court-orders@wordpress.com.

Yes real freedom of speech UniMedders, not the Esoteric variety. 

I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.  Oscar Wilde

Google appeared to say something similar to WordPress, so whatever happens, our content will be backed up and stored elsewhere. Who knows, we might post it on a few platforms at once. You can guarantee though, the more the cult tries to suppress the facts, the more resourceful we’ll get, and I daresay the more resourced. The public hates cults, but what the cult doesn’t seem to comprehend is how touchy people get about freedom of speech.