Google Censors Document Tracking COVID Vaccine Stories

Google has censored a public Google document collecting stories in mainstream news media and posts on social media about adverse reaction to COVID-19 vaccines. The document was over 100 pages long when it was censored by Google. It has since been re-hosted at this website.

Former ITV and BBC journalist Anna Brees noticed that the document had been censored by Google in a post on Twitter.

“First time I’ve seen a cloud drive blocking a document,” said Brees. “It was a very long document re vaccination headlines from around the world. This was a document sent to me via email. I was able to view it three days ago but now it says this.”

Brees shared a screenshot showing a message from Google informing users that the document was “in violation of our terms of service.”

Brees herself has been the target of Big Tech censorship for her coverage of coronavirus. She recently interviewed Dr. Roger Hodkinson, a Canadian pathologist who was targeted by fact-checkers including the AFP in December after he declared COVID to be “just another bad flu.”

In retaliation for interviewing Hodkinson, Brees says YouTube deleted her video, while competing video platform Vimeo deleted not just the interview, but her entire account, including training materials for the video journalism school she owns and operates.

Brees says Google-owned YouTube took down the interview “within an hour.”

Google documents, part of the Google Drive service, does not have as well-known a track record of censorship as other Big Tech platforms, but its terms of service have long given Google the ability to censor a wide variety of documents. In 2017, Google Drive users referred to the company’s “creepy monitoring” of their documents as a potential source of censorship.

Google Drive’s extensive terms of service grant Google the power to remove “hate speech,” “harassment,” and “misleading content” among a range of other prohibited material.