For a short while, Google was blacklisting a number of conservative websites. This has been completely documented at various places and Google publicly apologized for it. An interesting (and ominous) thought at The Federalist:
Google Appears To Test Its Ability To Blacklist Conservative Media Ahead Of Election
Google appeared to test its ability to blacklist conservative media Tuesday from its monopolized search engine which garners at least 3.5 billion online searches everyday making up 94 percent of the internet’s search share.
Websites targeted, according to NewsBusters which itself was temporarily de-platformed, included the Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent, Breitbart, the Media Research Center, and CNSNews among others.
Chuck Ross, a reporter with the Daily Caller News Foundation discovered that his outlet was also included in Google’s Tuesday blackout when searching for stories related to Stefan Halper, an FBI informant who spied on the Trump campaign over the course of Crossfire Hurricane and was unmasked by Ross at the Caller.
And Google's explanation:
“Today we became aware of an issue that impacted some navigational and site: operator queries. We investigated and have since fixed the issue,” said a Google spokesperson. “This affected a number of sites representing a range of different content and viewpoints. This issue was a technical error unrelated to the content or ideology of the sites affected.”
The author's thesis is chilling - was this a dry run for the upcoming election? Sure could be.
Crap like this is why I have been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine and Brave as my browser. Both are free in every single sense of the word.
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