Big Tech rigged the algorithm. Then they weaponized it.



The algorithm is its own “Animal Farm.” “Four legs good, two legs bad” may come in the form of binary code, but the tyranny is just as real. Most content in alternative media gets watered down to please the ruling digital overlords.

Unless you work for a company like Blaze Media — which has built talent lineups that can thrive outside the algorithm — odds are, you were made to be ruled.

Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Trans — they’ve all come for you once. They’ll do it again.

Ever wonder why some “conservative” hosts sound bold on a handful of safe topics but go quiet on election interference or the COVID jab? The algorithm spoke. They complied.

Pound for pound, my show may have taken the biggest hit among conservatives trying to monetize YouTube traffic since 2020. That we managed to hit seven-figure revenues without help from the world’s largest search engine is, frankly, a miracle.

Big Tech operates like a loaded gun, aimed and cocked by the federal government.

The Biden administration didn’t just whisper suggestions. It literally contacted YouTube and demanded the censorship of Alex Berenson. That’s bad enough.

But thanks to research by DataRepublican and DOGE, we now know the algorithm went a step further — using your tax dollars to boost regime-approved content across major tech platforms through USAID.

That’s not just outrageous. It’s an antitrust violation, plain and simple. And I don’t plan on taking it lying down.

For several months, I’ve worked with First Liberty in Dallas — one of the nation’s top constitutional conservative legal organizations. With their help, I filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission just before Memorial Day. Here’s a key excerpt:

YouTube’s metrics show that the "Steve Deace Show" experienced explosive growth on YouTube in 2020. The show continued strong in 2021, but toward the end of that year, his videos started being removed. And this precipitated a sharp fall in views and impressions in 2022. The sharp decline strongly suggests that YouTube shadow banned or otherwise limited the visibility of the "Steve Deace Show" in 2022 and possibly starting in the end of 2021. During the same period of time where YouTube views and impressions were sharply declining, the "Steve Deace Show" experienced significant growth on other platforms. The show's strong performance on Apple Podcasts maintained their upper trajectory throughout this period of time.

Consider the contrast: While YouTube buried the show in 2021, my podcast was outperforming on Apple — strong enough to earn me a three-year contract extension with Blaze Media. That same year, my book “Faucian Bargain” became a No. 1 bestseller in the United States.

It doesn’t add up — unless you account for censorship.

In 2021, 69% of our YouTube views came from subscribers, 31% from nonsubscribers. In 2022, that number skewed even further — 76% subscribers, only 24% nonsubscribers. That ratio should never tilt that far. Most YouTube traffic typically comes from recommendations, not regular followers.

RELATED: Congress has the power to crush Big Tech’s app monopoly

Photo Illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

As we explained in our FTC complaint: “This trend line is clear evidence of suppression because it shows how YouTube refused to feature, refused to recommend, and otherwise decreased the visibility of the platform.”

Word is, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson takes Big Tech censorship seriously. I hope that’s true — because people likely died due to what YouTube did. Shows like mine were offering counternarratives to the COVID cult. And we were silenced.

Whoever controls language controls the debate. That’s why this isn’t just a tech policy fight. It’s a battle for the future of Western civilization.

The left has shown its hand: If they had the power, they’d disappear you. They already tried. Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Trans — they’ve all come for you once. They’ll do it again.

This isn’t a squabble over ad revenue or traffic metrics. It’s a battle against the deliberate unraveling of reality itself.

So fight we must. And with severe prejudice.

Stay tuned.

Steve Deace vs. Big Tech censorship — the battle everyone should be following



One of the keys to success in digital content creation is mastering search engine optimization — a powerful strategy that boosts a creator’s visibility. SEO involves using targeted keywords in video titles, descriptions, and tags, along with engaging thumbnails and captions, to help search engines like Google and YouTube rank content higher in search results, driving more viewers to discover it.

Here’s how it works: A YouTuber films a cooking video demonstrating a pasta recipe. To reach a wider audience, she applies SEO by crafting a keyword-rich title and description with phrases like “easy dinner ideas” and “quick pasta dish” and adding relevant tags to her video. If she does this well, she increases her video’s chances of ranking higher in YouTube search results, attracting more viewers in a competitive digital landscape.

But what happens when Big Tech shadow cabals in collaboration with federal entities decide to erect virtual barriers that prevent certain topics from appearing on search result pages — regardless of how adeptly the creator used SEO and other content-optimizing digital tools?

BlazeTV host Steve Deace has been living out the reality of that question for years.

Topics — especially “controversial” ones — YouTube, Apple iTunes, and Google have deemed problematic are quietly buried under an avalanche of other content. This censorship has been happening for years, so conservative content creators got smarter and found loopholes around the algorithms by avoiding key words and phrases they knew would be flagged and squashed.

However, Big Tech companies are now “transcribing everything that's said on podcasts,” meaning creators cannot avoid the consequences of discussing forbidden topics.

“So let's pretend we spend an entire entire show just debunking the demonic ideology of transgenderism, but we market it in a way that it says nothing about trans in order to try to get around the algorithm. Well, now that they're transcribing that for us, we can't get around that,” says producer Aaron McIntire.

Creators can appeal YouTube’s decision to demonetize their show, but success is rare. “There's basically no recourse whatsoever,” says Aaron.

“I would venture a guess we are the largest show in America with by far the most anemic YouTube traffic,” says Steve. “They're making it so we can't connect with our audiences, and if we can't connect with you, we can't hit the numbers we want to get the monetization we need to keep even doing this at all.”

Steve has been battling Big Tech censorship behind the scenes for years now. Recently, however, his fight experienced a new development when he contacted First Liberty — “the leading constitutional conservative political advocacy organization in the country” — which determined that Steve, indeed, had grounds to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

To hear where Steve is at in the process of fighting Big Tech censorship, watch the episode above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Congress has the power to crush Big Tech’s app monopoly



Global policymakers and consumers are weary of Big Tech monopolies. While excessive consolidation of power leads to privacy violations, price gouging, and stifling innovation, it poses a unique threat to free speech.

Trump administration antitrust enforcers understood that threat. As Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater observed, when a handful of companies control the flow of information, “someone can be disappeared from the internet quite easily.”

Digital free speech shouldn’t depend on the shifting preferences of Apple executives or Google policy teams.

Conservatives increasingly see Big Tech’s ability to distort and manipulate public discourse as a downstream effect of its market dominance. In the case of the mobile internet, it takes only two companies — Apple and Google — to control the smartphone experience of nearly every American.

Congress is beginning to respond. Two recently introduced bills would take on Apple and Google’s app store choke points directly. The Open App Markets Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and the App Store Freedom Act, sponsored by Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), aim to empower users by giving them the option to download apps from sources outside of Apple and Google’s proprietary platforms, including alternative marketplaces.

Why do these technical details matter for speech? Because Apple and Google’s gatekeeper power has already been abused to silence dissent.

In 2021, Parler — a social media app popular on the right — was removed from Apple and Google’s app stores for allegedly having “inadequate” content moderation policies. The timing followed reports that the platform was used to coordinate the January 6 Capitol riot. Virtually overnight, Parler went from one of the fastest growing apps in the world to a ghost town. Internet consumers move quickly, and the app’s months in Big Tech’s doghouse became a death sentence. Parler never recovered.

Parler wasn’t an isolated case. Years earlier, Google banned Gab, another free speech-oriented platform, while Apple never allowed it to launch in the first place. Google also initially refused to approve President Trump’s Truth Social due to concerns over its moderation policies. And abroad, Apple has bowed to authoritarian regimes — removing apps used by dissidents in China and Russia at the request of those governments.

RELATED: Upgrade to a dumbphone

http://www.fotogestoeber.de via iStock/Getty Images

The problem runs deeper than censorship. Apple and Google have used their dominance to dictate the design and speech choices of developers. App makers are often forbidden from communicating key information to users — such as the availability of cheaper subscription pricing outside of Apple and Google’s walled gardens.

The scope of their power is staggering. Roughly 91% of Americans own a smartphone. More than 99% of those devices run on Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating systems. And 88% of the time spent on those phones is inside apps — not on web browsers.

Without real guardrails, that bottleneck becomes a single point of failure. It’s a choke point ready to be exploited by governments, activist groups, or corporations that want to control speech.

Some openly defend the current system precisely because it allows Apple and Google to keep disfavored apps off the market. Even before Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), Apple and Google pressured the company to increase moderation. After Musk’s takeover, activist organizations lobbied Apple and Google to ban X altogether if Musk didn’t reinstate stricter content rules.

An open app ecosystem benefits everyone. Conservatives celebrating Big Tech’s apparent political shifts should remember how easily those loyalties change. Liberals worried about “tech bro” influence should support guardrails that limit partisan manipulation — regardless of who holds power.

Digital free speech shouldn’t depend on the shifting preferences of Apple executives or Google policy teams. Congress must act to restore balance and ensure pluralism. The Open App Markets Act and the App Store Freedom Act offer real, durable solutions. They deserve bipartisan support.

This investor is wiping out white-collar jobs



If you've never heard the name Elad Gil, you're not alone. He’s not a headline-chaser or a techno-evangelist. He doesn’t preach on panels. He doesn’t tweet manifestos. He doesn’t need to. His name travels in whispers, passed from boardroom to boardroom like a trade secret. Yet what Gil is quietly engineering could shape the economy for decades, perhaps even forever.

Not through invention, but through subtraction.

Gil made his money the Silicon Valley way — early and often. Google, Twitter, Stripe, Airbnb. He was a ghost in the margins, always one chess move ahead. But now, the ghost is stepping into the light. According to TechCrunch, Gil has turned his attention to service businesses: accounting firms, law offices, and marketing agencies. Stable. Predictable. Bloated with white-collar workers. The kinds of jobs parents once prayed their children would land. And that’s exactly why he’s targeting them.

Is it heartless? That depends on whether you think hearts belong in the workplace.

The model is surgical: Acquire the business, replace the humans with AI, use the freed-up cash to buy the next one, and repeat. Some might refer to it as innovation. I prefer to label it consolidation through automation. A system designed not to disrupt but to dismantle, not just head count but entire categories of human purpose.

Take a beat to really absorb that. Gil isn’t automating the future. He’s converting the present. Turning human institutions — businesses once run by people, for people — into stripped-down algorithmic systems. Places where your skills, your degree, and your job title don’t mean anything any more. Because the thing doing your job now doesn’t sleep, doesn’t complain, doesn't have flings with colleagues, and doesn’t ask for a raise.

A machine with no need for you

Gil’s investments include Klarity, which uses AI to automate back office work across industries as varied as accounting, finance, health care, insurance, and law – where it helps remove the need for junior associates and legal clerks. Pricey legal work, a crucial upward mobility pipeline for generations, is especially in the crosshairs; there’s also HarveyAI, catching on fast in elite law firms across the U.S. Entire tiers of legal support are becoming obsolete. In marketing, meanwhile, firms like Copy.ai and Jasper are turning copywriters and ad creatives into legacy roles. It’s not “do more with less.” It’s “do everything with code.”

Is it heartless? That depends on whether you think hearts belong in the workplace.

Gil and his cohort don’t. To them, the human being isn’t a collaborator. It’s a friction point. A legacy system waiting to be deprecated. Unlike the robber barons of a century ago — who, however brutally, still depended on human labor to build their empires — today’s technocrats don’t need you. They need your data. Your patterns. Your output, divorced from your existence. This is a different species of capitalism. Not extractive, but excisive.

And let’s be honest — this isn’t just about greedy investors. Gil’s strategy lands because many of these jobs, for years, have been pointless. A generation of college graduates was funneled into open-plan offices to send emails, fine-tune slide decks, and sit through meetings that led nowhere. The "bulls**t job" economy, as David Graeber put it, was never built to last. But that doesn’t mean what replaces it will be better or more humane.

You can call these jobs expendable. Maybe they were. But they still structured lives. They paid mortgages. They gave people routine, insurance, and purpose. They were a way in. And now, increasingly, they’re a way out — out of the economy, out of relevance, out of the social contract.

RELATED: BlackRock’s illusion of choice: Are investors truly empowered — or manipulated?

SOPA/Getty Images

Ontological redesign

Some cheer this shift. Let the accountants go. Let the copywriters retrain. Let the middle managers find something “real” to do. But real where? And for whom?

The jobs replacing these eliminated roles don’t exist — not at scale, not at pay, not with stability. The idea that workers can simply upskill and move into “AI oversight” or “prompt engineering” is a Silicon Valley fairy tale. For every prompt engineer making $300K, there are a hundred people waiting tables or fighting with gig apps for scraps.

When the AI wave rolls over the white-collar workforce, there’s no levee to stop it. No new Roosevelt. No Marshall Plan for knowledge work. Just the slow, quiet disappearance of millions of people from the center of economic life. And when the lights go out in those buildings, when the consultants, creatives, and coordinators vanish from LinkedIn, what comes next?

Nothing.

Gil’s model isn’t just about economic efficiency. It’s about ontological redesign. It asks: What kinds of people should exist in a digital economy? And the answer, increasingly, is: fewer. Fewer thinkers. Fewer doers. Fewer citizens with jobs that anchor them to a class, a community, and a sense of contribution.

What remain are consumers. Subscribers. Passive users of a system run by invisible technocrats who, like Gil, don’t need to advertise. They don’t govern with slogans. They govern with math. With marginal gains. With software that logs on when you’re asleep and decides that, actually, you’re no longer needed.

There are no protests for this kind of change, no uprisings, and no villains twirling mustaches on TV. The great erasure is happening in silence — in HR spreadsheets, calendar invites that never get sent, and job postings that never go live.

And the most sinister part?

It works.

Profits go up. Costs go down. Investors cheer. Business schools start case studies. Politicians, desperate not to look Luddite, parrot the line that “AI will create more jobs than it destroys.” And they may even believe it.

But such a belief doesn't mirror reality. In fact, it ignores it.

The automated and displaced

Let’s say you’re 42, mid-career, working at a regional law firm or a mid-tier marketing agency. You’re not a thought leader. You’re not building apps in your spare time. You’re just ... working. Supporting a family, trying to get ahead.

Your firm gets acquired by one of Gil’s AI-forward portfolio companies. Your job is “automated.” No severance, just a link to an AI help center and a webinar about how to “future-proof your skills.” Good luck. Try Fiverr. Try Upwork. Try not to drown. The truth is, people like you don’t get retrained. You get sidelined.

And the longer you're out, the harder it gets to claw your way back in. Not because you're unqualified, but because the rules changed in the blink of an eye. Because the economy stopped needing you.

To be fair, Gil didn’t invent this trajectory. He’s just executing it more efficiently — and more quietly — than most. He’s not building a Terminator. He’s building infrastructure. Tools, workflows, and systems designed to remove human labor the way a surgeon removes a tumor: cleanly, clinically, with minimal disruption to the host.

But make no mistake. Once you strip out enough of those pieces, the whole system fails. Not with a bang, but with quiet resignation. So when your child asks what job he should pursue, what do you tell him? If a degree in law or accounting can be outpaced by an LLM trained on Reddit threads and the Harvard Law Review, where does that leave stability? What becomes of upward mobility or any sense of security at all?

Gil may not be the architect of dystopia, but he is its quiet contractor, making acquisitions one at a time.

The question isn’t whether we stop him. It’s whether we recognize what he represents and whether we’re willing to fight for a future in which relevance isn’t defined by whether or not you can be replaced by a line of code. Because if we don’t, then the most terrifying part won’t be what Gil builds.

It’ll be what he no longer needs.

Us.

Censorship Is Democrats’ Only Means Of Political Survival

Obama's embrace of censorship speaks to the desperation of a party that can't survive without uniform control of the information space.

America doesn’t need to copy the Chinese. We need to beat them.



The United States invented GPS. But under Joe Biden, we ceded our leadership in critical technologies to China — and opened the door to disaster. With President Trump back in charge, we have a chance to correct course and secure the future of our economy and national defense.

GPS powers everything. From military operations to farmers in the field, from ATMs to Amazon delivery, satellite-based positioning underpins modern life. But the system has one glaring weakness: no backup. One solar flare, one jammed signal, one cyberattack could knock it out — and take everything with it. Microseconds of disruption could halt supply chains, stall air traffic, and put American lives at risk.

In his first term, Trump leapfrogged China in 5G development. Now we must do it again — with GPS.

The Chinese Communist Party knows it.

While Washington slept, China built a terrestrial backup to GPS — an old-school solution using low-frequency signals and bulky infrastructure, rooted in World War II-era tech. It’s not flashy. But it’s functional. And today, it gives Beijing an edge.

America now faces a choice: Copy China’s playbook — or leap ahead.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr (R) laid out the stakes in a recent Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo. “During the Biden years, we fell deeply behind China,” Carr said. “The good news is we have the playbook. President Trump came in his first term and said we must lead the world in 5G. We did exactly that. ... This Trump administration is going to step up again.”

Carr is right. We’ve seen this before. In his first term, Trump leapfrogged China in 5G development. Now we must do it again — with GPS.

That starts with backing a 5G-based backup for GPS. Unlike China’s clunky eLoran system, a 5G-based solution reflects American innovation. It uses ground-based infrastructure and existing networks to deliver a wide-scale, secure, and reliable alternative to GPS — without costing taxpayers a dime. Private industry could roll it out before the end of Trump’s term.

In other words: It’s shovel-ready, future-proof, and 100% Made in America.

Not everyone wants that. Some voices in the policy debate are pushing China’s model instead. And they’re not just misguided — they’re compromised.

As Breitbart recently reported, a coalition of anti-Trump interests and China-linked entities has tried to stall U.S. progress on GPS backup technology. One group, the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, consistently attacks 5G solutions. Unsurprisingly, the group's founding members include UrsaNav — the very firm that helped build China and Russia’s eLoran networks.

RELATED: From Wuhan to Michigan: Feds nab ANOTHER Chinese scholar in alleged bio-material smuggling plot

erhui1979 via iStock/Getty Images

These aren’t just competing policy proposals. They’re coordinated efforts to keep America vulnerable.

We didn’t win the Cold War by patching up the telegraph. We invented the internet. We didn’t defend our skies with rebuilt biplanes. We created stealth bombers and drones. The same principle applies here. This isn’t about replicating China’s last move. It’s about defining what comes next.

And we’ve already started.

Carr and the FCC have launched a formal proceeding to explore “positioning, navigation, and timing” alternatives. That builds on President Trump’s first-term legacy, when he signed bipartisan legislation to strengthen GPS resilience. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called it “crucial to the national and economic security of the United States.”

That leadership set the standard. Now we must finish the job.

We face a clear choice. One path copies the Chinese Communist Party and locks us into outdated infrastructure. The other unleashes American ingenuity and secures our future through private-sector innovation and Trump-era vision.

Let’s not backtrack. Let’s build forward. Let’s lead again.

There’s a simple logic behind Palantir’s controversial rise in Washington



In 2003 Palo Alto, California, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and cohorts founded a software company called Palantir. Now, these 20-odd years later, with stock prices reaching escape velocity and government and commercial contracts secured from Huntsville to Huntington, Palantir seems to have arrived in the pole position of the AI race.

With adamantine ties to the Trump administration and deep history with U.S. intelligence and military entities to boot, Palantir has emerged as a decisive force in the design and management of our immediate technological, domestic, and geopolitical futures.

Curious, then, that so many, including New York Times reporters, seem to believe that Palantir is merely another souped-up data hoarding and selling company like Google or Adobe.

The next-level efficiency, one imagines, will have radical implications for our rather inefficient lives.

It’s somewhat understandable, but the scales and scopes in play are unprecedented. To get a grasp on the scope of Palantir’s project, consider that every two days now humanity churns out the same amount of information that was accrued over the previous 5,000 years of civilization.

As then-Gartner senior vice president Peter Sondergaard put it more than a decade ago, “Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”

Palantir spent the last 20 years building that analytics combustion engine. It arrives as a suite of AI products tailored to various markets and end users. The promise, as the era of Palantir proceeds and as AI-centered business and governance takes hold, is that decisions will be made with a near-complete grasp on the totality of real-time global information.

RELATED: Trump's new allies: Tech billionaires are jumping on the MAGA train

The Washington Post/Getty Images

The tech stack

Famously seeded with CIA In-Q-Tel cash, Palantir started by addressing intelligence agency needs. In 2008, the Gotham software product, described as a tool for intelligence agencies to analyze complex datasets, went live. Gotham is said to integrate and analyze disparate datasets in real time to enable pattern recognition and threat detection. Joining the CIA, FBI, and presumably most other intelligence agencies in deploying Gotham are the Centers for Disease Control and Department of Defense.

Next up in the suite is Foundry, which is, again, an AI-based software solution but geared toward industry. It purportedly serves to centralize previously siloed data sources to effect maximum efficiency. Health care, finance, and manufacturing all took note and were quick to integrate Foundry. PG&E, Southern California, and Edison are all satisfied clients. So is the Wendy’s burger empire.

The next in line of these products, which we’ll see are integrated and reciprocal in their application to client needs, is Apollo, which is, according the Palantir website, “used to upgrade, monitor, and manage every instance of Palantir’s product in the cloud and at some of the world’s most regulated and controlled environments.” Among others, Morgan Stanley, Merck, Wejo, and Cisco are reportedly all using Apollo.

If none of this was impressive enough, if the near-total penetration into both business and government (U.S., at least) at foundational levels isn’t evident yet, consider the crown jewel of the Palantir catalog, which integrates all the others: Ontology.

“Ontology is an operational layer for the organization,” Palantir explains. “The Ontology sits on top of the digital assets integrated into the Palantir platform (datasets and models) and connects them to their real-world counterparts, ranging from physical assets like plants, equipment, and products to concepts like customer orders or financial transactions.”

Every aspect native to a company or organization — every minute of employee time, any expense, item of inventory, and conceptual guideline — is identified, located, and cross-linked wherever and however appropriate to maximize efficiency.

The next-level efficiency, one imagines, will have radical implications for our rather inefficient lives. Consider the DMV, the wait list, the tax prep: Anything that can be processed (assuming enough energy inputs for the computation) can be — ahead of schedule.

The C-suite

No backgrounder is complete without some consideration of a company’s founders. The intentions, implied or overt, from Peter Thiel and Alex Karp in particular are, in some ways, as ponderable as the company’s ultra-grade software products and market dominance.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp stated in his triumphal 2024 letter to shareholders: “Our results are not and will never be the ultimate measure of the value, broadly defined, of our business. We have grander and more idiosyncratic aims.” Karp goes on to quote both Augustine and Houellebecq as he addresses the company’s commitment first to America.

This doesn’t sound quite like the digital panopticon or the one-dimensionally malevolent elite mindset we were threatened with for the last 20 years. Despite their outsized roles and reputations, Thiel companies tend toward the relatively modest goals of reducing overall harm or risk. Reflecting the influence of Rene Girard’s theory that people rapidly spiral into hard-to-control and ultimately catastrophic one-upsmanship, the approach reflects a considerably more sophisticated point of view than Karl Rove’s infamously dismissive claim to be “history’s actors.”

“Initially, the rise of the digital security state was a neoconservative project,” Blaze Media editor at large James Poulos remarked on the dynamic. “But instead of overturning this Bush-era regime, the embedded Obama-Biden elite completed the neocon system. That’s how we got the Cheneys endorsing Kamala.”

In a series of explanatory posts on X made via the company's Privacy and Ethics account and reposted on its webpage, Palantir elaborated: “We were the first company to establish a dedicated Privacy & Civil Liberties Engineering Team over a decade ago, and we have a longstanding Council of Advisors on Privacy & Civil Liberties comprised of leading experts and advocates. These functions sit at the heart of the company and help us to embody Palantir’s values both through providing rights-protective technologies and fostering a culture of responsibility around their development and use.”

It's a far cry from early 2000s rhetoric and corporate policy, and so the issue becomes one of evaluation. Under pressure from the immensity of the data, the ongoing domestic and geopolitical instability manifesting in myriad forms, and particularly the bizarre love-hate interlocking economic mechanisms between the U.S. and China, many Americans are hungry to find a scapegoat.

Do we find ourselves, as Americans at least, with the advantage in this tense geopolitical moment? Or are we uncharacteristically behind in the contest for survival? An honest assessment of our shared responsibility for our national situation might lead away from scapegoating, toward a sense that we made our bed a while ago on technology and security and now we must lie in it.

New Texas Law Targets Mass Screen Addiction Among Kids

Unless parents make a concerted effort to deal with the smartphone, the great majority of kids will never come close to reaching their full potential.

Netflix’s chilling new surveillance tools are watching YOU



There was a time, for a brief second, when Netflix felt like a genuine escape. No ads. No distractions. Just a moment of sacred silence before the next episode auto-played. YouTube, on the other hand, has always been the neighborhood hawker, jamming five-second countdowns and “skip” buttons between cat videos and clips of Candace Owens speaking with Harvey Weinstein. But Netflix? It felt different. Intentional. Entirely neutral.

Not any more.

We now know that YouTube, owned by Google (the company that famously deleted “don’t be evil” from its code of conduct), uses AI to analyze your viewing habits in real time. The company calls it Peak Points, a system that detects when you’re most emotionally invested. Not so it can recommend better content. No, it’s so YouTube can slice in an ad. A perfectly timed disruption — just as you’re crying, laughing, leaning in. Not after. During. Essentially, it’s manipulation dressed as optimization.

Soon you won’t be choosing shows. You’ll be chosen by them.

If Google pulling this stunt doesn’t surprise you, that’s because nothing Google does should surprise you. What should worry you, however, is Netflix quietly following suit, disguised beneath its polished UI and faux prestige. To be clear, this isn’t a case of algorithms nudging you toward rom-coms or action thrillers. This is full-blown behavioral harvesting, run out of what’s called “clean rooms," a fancy way of saying they’re still collecting everything, just behind closed doors. They promise it’s private. But they still track your habits, reactions, pauses, and clicks. They’re not watching you, they insist. Just everything you do.

Netflix’s ad-supported tier allows third-party data brokers — including Experian (more on this notorious credit score company in a minute) — to build a psychological profile on you. Your stress tells them what to sell. Your loneliness tells them when to sell it. Your late-night binge-watching isn’t just a pattern; it’s a profile. You think you’re relaxing, when in reality, you're participating in a lab study that you never signed up for. Not knowingly, anyway.

Netflix used to sell impressions. Now, however, it's selling intimacy — your intimacy. It's the kind of advertising that doesn’t feel like advertising because it’s been trained to mimic your tone, your mood, your hesitation. Mid-roll ads now talk back. Pause screens offer prompts and tailored suggestions based not on your genre preferences but on your emotional volatility.

Even rewinds are a metric now. Linger too long on one scene? It wasn’t just memorable — it was actionable. Every flicker of interest, every second you lean forward, becomes a flag for monetization. A signal to tweak the pitch, change the lighting, or modify the ad delivery window.

You’re not the customer any more. You’re the subject.

This is much more than targeted marketing. It is emotional extraction. Netflix and YouTube are conditioning you and your loved ones. The goal is no longer passive consumption. It’s emotive response mining. Once satisfied with getting your eyeballs, they now want what’s behind them.

And here’s the most worrying part: Their devious plan is working.

RELATED: Netflix shares blunt message to woke employees offended by its content: 'Netflix may not be the best place for you'

ROBERT SULLIVAN/AFP via Getty Images

You feel it when your pause screen suddenly knows you’re restless. You sense it when an ad knows you’re anxious. But you can’t prove it, because this isn’t surveillance as we used to know it. It’s ambient, implicit, and sanitized. Framed as “user experience.” But make no mistake, the living room has been compromised.

Netflix used to say, “See what’s next.” But increasingly, the real motto is “see what we see.” Every moment of attention, every flicker, flinch, or fast-forward, is a data point. Every glance is a gamble, wagered against your most vulnerable instincts.

Which brings us back to Experian. By partnering with the same data broker that helps banks deny loans, Netflix is making a statement. A troubling one.

Experian isn’t just some boring credit bureau. It’s one of the largest consumer data aggregators on the planet. It tracks what you buy, what you browse, where you live, how often you move, how many credit cards you have, what you watch, what you search, and what you owe. It then slices that information into little behavioral fragments to sell to advertisers, insurers, lenders, and now … to Netflix.

With 90 million U.S. users, Netflix has now integrated with a company whose entire business model revolves around profiling you — right down to your risk appetite, spending triggers, and likelihood of defaulting on a loan.

So while you're watching a true-crime documentary to unwind, Experian is in the back end, silently refining your “predictive segment.” Your favorite comedy special could now become a soft proxy for Experian to gauge how impulsive you are. That docuseries about minimalism? Great test case for your spending restraint. They don’t just want to know what you watch. They want to know what you’ll buy after. Or worse, what you’ll believe next.

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The future isn’t one of generic binge-watching. It’s curated manipulation. Your partner just walked out? Cue romantic dramas … with targeted ads for dating apps. Watching a dystopian thriller? Insert ads for tech “solutions” to the very problems being dramatized.

Soon you won’t be choosing shows. You’ll be chosen by them. Not because they’re good, but because they serve a data-driven purpose. If you're a Netflix subscriber, perhaps it’s time to consider whether it still makes sense to continue funding the violation of your privacy.