Recently I had a conversation with someone I know very well. He is very passionate about one of the political subjects facing our country. While many of us have turned away from traditional media and to the internet for news, there is something else you should realize that is going on around us. I tried to explain that he is a victim of censorship.

Searching on the internet by the major search engines has been tailored for your viewing.  While you may not have noticed the difference in searching, has become individualized.  Searching for the same terms by any two people now yields very different results. It is true on several of the major commercial search engines.  While this might not bother you, having large companies tailor what you see, it is, in fact, censoring out what isn’t shown.

For a lot of people getting an understanding of the news is important.  I have demonstrated the disparity of search results with several people that I know.  The majority of the time our searches yielded different results or completely different webpages. News terms, however, displayed completely different points of view.

The social networks also mimic the search engines, showing a personalized view of what others post. This observation holds true throughout the larger systems.  Social networks are using reordering content based on relevance for each user.

People have been increasing depending on the internet for news, with the decline of newspapers.  Blogs and social posts are driving many of the views expressed on stories impacting news events. These since the beginning of last year are being manipulated together.  Television news organizations also depend on social media for the importance of stories that are reported. The total system of news now is being graded as to relevance to each individual.

You are in a world is driven by agenda, make no mistake there is no real source of news that is really not biased.  Granted we also have our own opinions, we cater to our bias though what we prefer to understand about the world.

Search engines are practicing a form censorship

When you open a search engine to search through news or web results, you are not getting the world of information you think you are.   Actually, what you are getting are increasingly filtered and sanitized versions of major stories. So to fix this it will take some personal effort.

One option is to bypass government and corporate spying on your internet actions. There are other ways to get on the internet from your computer.  Almost all computers today are capable of starting from the DVD drive. Tails is a live Linux distribution that can run from a DVD and is easy to use and requires nothing to be installed.

You will need Firefox installed on your computer to download the ISO file of tails. An ISO is an image file; both windows and Mac offer a method of burning the downloaded file to a blank DVD.  Simply restart your computer after creating the DVD to be in a completely secure and anonymous connection to the internet. Be sure not to use email or sign in to any server or service on the internet.

You can download tails from https://tails.boum.org

Anouther option is to use a computer that is not related to you like at a library for example. Censorship is not an acceptable practice anywhere, especially on the internet.