How the U.S. Government CENSORS your news

You can only talk about sex, drugs and gossip anymore if you want to get paid.

Most Americans remain blissfully unaware that the U.S. government has found a way to censor news without being implicated in the plot. However, staff at the California Network and in other media organizations have been made painfully aware that certain topics are not to be discussed.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) - At the California Network, we first noticed censorship in 2014. There were rumors that censorship was taking place previous to that, but it became very apparent with the rise of the Islamic State.

As Christians were being persecuted and executed on film, a decision was made to broadcast these horrors to the world in the hopes of spurring action. Raw footage and sophisticated, edited content were coming from the region in great quantities since most of the technological infrastructure remained in place. As we proceeded to go to press with some of this content we noticed that it had a tendency to disappear.

The content did not merely disappear from one place, but from the multiple sources where it was hosted. Often, the content was graphic in nature, so there was some understanding of the decision not to host it. But it was still censorship.

Since 2014, the censorship has grown in two ways. The first is hard censorship, which is the actual removal and suppression of content the U.S. government would rather you not consume. The second is soft censorship where the government is encouraging the media to drown out serious news topics with nonsense and smut.

Today, ISIS continues to crank out execution videos, often highly edited and shockingly disturbing. But it is now impossible to see this content unless you are willing to visit the darkest corners of the web. At the California Network, we catch the content as it is released, but we know the clock is ticking once it appears. Sure enough it goes away after a few hours at best. Searching for the content becomes difficult as it is scrubbed from the web. Most people never know it existed.

In investigating this phenomenon, we have pieced together what is going on.

The U.S. government is indirectly censoring the media by pressuring media and hosting services to suppress material they do not like. Specifically, companies like YouTube, Live Leak and Google, among many others, will actively delete the content themselves and suppress it in search results. According to our sources, this appears to be handled by algorithm.

If the content scrubbed from the web were merely ISIS propaganda and snuff videos, we could almost understand. Naturally, nobody wants to give ISIS a platform to spread their evil agenda. But the censorship is now spreading to other topics.

When Hillary Clinton fell ill during a 9/11 memorial and appeared to collapse on film, the content went viral. Then it began to disappear from various sources. We strongly suspect an attempt was made to suppress the video. Unfortunately for the powers that be, the video went viral instantly and was short enough to be rapidly ripped and duplicated. The censors still aren't that good -yet.

But there are other ways to censor the media. One is to punish the publishers directly by depriving them of revenue. YouTube is the most notorious offender, having de-monetized lucrative content from the media and independent bloggers alike because it was deemed "controversial."

Now, YouTube only monetizes content that it considers "ad-friendly." This policy began in 2012, but has ramped up to full only recently. It has deprived content creators and the media of millions of dollars and serves as excellent discouragement for people to shy away from certain topics such as terrorism, war, religion and politics. This has a massive chilling effect on speech, because if the media covers some aspect of a war that the public has an interest in knowing about, it will be doing so on a charitable basis. But journalists need to eat, too.

For its part, search giants such as Google suppress search results they don't want you to see. Again, many links critical of Hillary Clinton have recently been suppressed, as users across the U.S. have been pointing out.

The impact of these policies is that if those who work in the media want to get paid, they need to cover different topics, shying away from war, religion and political critiques.

Safe topics include sex, sexuality, transgenderism, homosexuality, the legalization of marijuana and other drugs, and all sorts of celebrity gossip. Nonsense and the absurd are good to go.

The best part for the government is they can claim to be ignorant of the whole thing. The censorship is handled on the corporate level and nobody goes to jail. Or so we believe. There are cases of federal harassment of content creators, but we have not yet vetted the reports.

So censorship is alive and well in America, it comes in a couple forms, hard and soft, and it's ostensibly being done by private firms not the federal government. But the truth is beginning to emerge. Unfortunately, with the public so distracted by deciding which bathroom to use and keeping pace with the Kadashians, it's difficult to see anything changing in the near future.

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