Something is deciding what you're allowed to see online — and it isn't you.
You follow an account because you trust it. Then the posts stop arriving, the view count slides a little lower every day, and searching the person’s own name doesn’t even surface them. Most people assume the creator faded. Sarah Westall says they were filtered — quietly, deliberately, by a system you were never meant to notice.
Westall is a journalist with more than 1,500 episodes and over 100 million downloads, and she’s now suing Google in an antitrust case with one goal: force into open court the actual mechanism behind the shadow banning, and the hand that operates it.
What she’s describing doesn’t stop at journalists. It reaches small businesses, political candidates, and the comment you left this morning that went nowhere for reasons no one will explain.
You’re being told to trust systems that are quietly working against you.
What Sarah found about how the censorship actually works is the part nobody was supposed to see.
On October 15, 2020, a wave of takedowns hit independent media all at once. Sarah calls it “the day the internet died.” A group of them — she counts around 15 — sued Google after the purge, and their combined reach wasn’t fringe. “We had more views than mainstream media did on cable,” she says. “We were a powerhouse and they had to take us down.”
With the big independent voices gone, the platforms gave the mainstream outlets time to move back in and seed their own players across the internet — quietly reshaping what shows up in front of you today.
The suppression doesn’t care how good the work is. “No matter how good our journalism is, no matter how much we are truthful, They suppress us ‘cause it’s not the narrative they want out there.”
Two legal shifts turned that instinct into a system. Sarah points to the 2012 update to the Smith-Mundt Act, which she says lifted the old wall against the government aiming domestic messaging at its own citizens. Pair that with Section 230, the shield that protects big tech from liability for what it filters, and you get a machine that can push an approved message and bury anyone countering it — at the same time.
“Now you have the ability to do propaganda and the ability to censor those who are counteracting that propaganda.”
But knowing a machine exists and proving how it runs are two different fights. The second one is where Sarah says the real evidence is hiding.
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There’s a score attached to your name, and you can’t see it or argue with it.
Sarah describes a widely used “Bias Fact Checker” that rates journalists for trustworthiness and feeds that rating into browsers, AI systems, libraries, and universities. “There’s nobody you can talk to.” No appeal. No human on the other end.
What it flagged in her case is the tell. The article it scored her on was built almost entirely from direct quotes by DARPA’s own scientists, accurately laying out what the program actually does. The other two items it judged her on, she says, weren’t even hers — one was someone else’s website, the other an article she didn’t write. Accurate reporting, marked as misinformation, then wired into the tools that decide who stays visible.
This is the quiet part of censorship. It isn’t a dramatic ban you can point to. It’s a filter applied before anyone gets to choose — scoring not just journalists but “everyday people that comment wrong,” until their reach simply flatlines.
And the stakes aren’t hypothetical. Sarah points to the recent release of documents by Tulsi Gabbard that she says show the U.S. government had funded biolabs overseas — the same claim platforms once worked overtime to suppress. “It came out that it was true all along.” The reporting that got throttled was the reporting that turned out to be right.
That’s the system keeping you quiet. Destroying you on purpose is the next level — and Sarah was about to find out how it feels.
While Sarah couldn’t get her own channel reinstated, copies of her were thriving.
She describes four fake “Sarah Westall” channels built to look like hers — two of them monetized, reposting her content and earning money off it. Her real channel stayed down as “dangerous.” The fakes stayed up and got paid.
After her attorneys sent formal letters to Google, she says the search results didn’t get cleaned up — they got worse. Obscure smear videos she’d never seen climbed to the front page, alongside content from a fringe channel that spliced her name next to graphic, degrading material engineered to make a serious journalist look like anything but.
At first she wondered if it was just her — “Am I imagining this?” So she had people across the country pull it up on their own phones. Friends in California, Texas, South Carolina were all seeing the same smear on the same front page, every time. It was not a glitch. It was a campaign.
The point of it all, she believes, was the message itself: “We can do whatever we want to you and there’s nothing anybody can ever do to us.” And the legal letters didn’t slow it down — “they escalated it.”
That’s the moment the lawsuit stopped being about her. “If they can do this to me, they can do it to anyone.” Decide to smear someone, and the same machinery does the rest.
Which raises the question a lot of people figured was settled the moment Elon Musk took over Twitter and Trump won back the White House — wasn’t the censorship supposed to be over?
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The change in leadership didn’t end the censorship. In some ways it just rebranded it.
The promised “digital Bill of Rights” never arrived, and bills for digital ID and age verification are now moving at both the federal and state level — several of them pushed by Trump allies.
The X takeover fits the same template. To a lot of users it looked like free speech came back. What Sarah and Maria describe is a swap — the old mainstream press replaced by paid influencer networks that are “much cheaper than the mainstream media, much easier to buy and compromise.”
Sarah puts it in historical terms. “They come in when they wanna take power, they take over the media. First thing they do is take over the media.” New tech, she says, just makes the old playbook more efficient.
This is why nothing ever seems to actually change. Maria points to the SAVE Act — a voting bill that was part of Trump's own agenda, then blocked by Republicans, with Trump saying nothing against the ones who killed it. She also referenced a recent Epstein hearing where witnesses came to testify and the very Republicans who'd spent years vowing to expose the files didn't show. The conclusion is one plenty of readers have quietly reached on their own: “Everything is theater and nothing of serious substance that helps the people is achieved most of the time.”
Underneath all of it sits one collapsing asset — trust. When the courts stop working, when people stop believing their vote matters, when a connected few look untouchable, institutions don’t just lose an argument. They lose their authority.
However, Sarah believes the public can win again. “We won COVID, we really did, in the hearts and minds of people.” But the next round won’t be fought over cat memes. The same players are now sitting on AI tools “far more advanced” than anything the public gets to touch — and the grotesque caricature search engines built of her is a small preview of what synthetic media could build of anyone.
The machine that decides what you see is about to get far more powerful. That’s exactly why her case is bigger than her — it may be the last real chance to drag it into open court before it’s too entrenched to stop.
Sarah’s case could force Google to open the black box and show the world exactly how it decides who vanishes.
That’s what this lawsuit is really chasing — not a settlement, but the truth, under oath. Discovery would drag the whole machine into the light: sworn testimony, internal documents, the actual code and policies behind who gets buried and who gets boosted. The thing they’ve spent years pretending doesn’t exist.
Which is exactly why they’re fighting so hard to keep it from ever getting there. Google is already trying to move the case out of DC to California, with a motion to dismiss lined up behind it. “They’re gonna throw every single wrench at us they possibly can.”
If there were nothing under the hood, they’d open it.
As Sherri Tenpenny told Sarah: “you’re fighting for the country, you shouldn’t have to pay for it yourself.”
Support the mission at sarahwestall.com/lawsuit, or through her campaign on GiveSendGo. Then send it to every person whose feed went quiet and never knew why.
Because the lesson here is clear: the systems you’re told to trust can flip a switch on you. They’ve done it to her voice. And your money is wired to the very same switch.
We want to thank Sarah Westall for joining us today—and more importantly, we want to thank you for watching and doing your duty to be informed when so many others choose not to.
Follow us (@ZeeeMedia and @VigilantFox) for stories that matter—stories the media doesn’t want you to see.
We’ll be back with another show tomorrow. See you then.
