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January 4, 2011

Taxpayer dollars used to game Google search engine

Rick Moran
I can certainly think of better uses for our taxes, but besides the waste of money, this is positively Orwellian; the government games Google search to have it's own explanation of the health care bill come up on the vitally important first page when "Obamacare" is typed into the search line.

Weekly Standard blog:

Try typing "Obamacare" into Google, and you'll find that the first entry is now the Obama administration's www.healthcare.gov. If you don't particularly like that result, you'll probably hate the fact that you're paying for it.
You'll get the same paid-for result if you type in "Obamacare facts," "Obamacare summary," "Obamacare info," "Obamacare overview," "Obamacare questions," "Obamacare explanation," "Obamacare basics," "Obamacare pros and cons," "Obamacare and elderly," and even "Obamacare and abortion." For each of these search terms, and many others, the Obama administration's site comes up first, as a paid entry. But it doesn't come up if you type in "ObamaCare repeal."

Politico's Ben Smith, in a post entitled "HHS Buys 'ObamaCare,'" quotes an official from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who confirms that this clear attempt to influence what Americans read about Obamacare does, indeed, represent your tax dollars at work: "'We are using a bunch of search term[s] to help point people to HealthCare.gov. [It's] [p]art of our online efforts to help get accurate information to people about the new law (i.e. [we] also use Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webcasts),' an HHS official confirmed by e-mail."

What kind of "accurate information" is HHS dispensing?

The "accurate information" that Americans will glean about the massive health care overhaul from this HHS website is of the same sort that President Obama has supplied all along -- such as that Obamacare would lower health costs (only 17 percent of Americans believe this), increase the quality of care (only 22 percent believe this), and reduce deficits (only 17 percent believe this).

This is another way to stifle criticism, of course, Unless you want to page through the search results and find counter arguments, HHS has made it harder to find alternative viewpoints about Obamacare. This would have been a tactic used by Oceanian to guide their citizens to think the right way if Orwell could have imagined the internet.

Pretty scary even without Orwell.

Hat Tip: Ed Lasky

Thomas Lifson adds:

David Axelrod, master propagandist, has left few stones unturned in the effort to sell ObamaCare to the public, using the public's tax dollars, of course. Remember the appeals to report "fishy" information circulating about ObamaCare to the Feds? Then came the Andy Griffith commercials, still running, claiming all sorts of wonderful things coming from the Democrats' handiwork. Now we fiund this attempt to keep contrary views inconspicuous.

All financed with our taxes (and money borrowed from the Chinese).

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