If Google's dinging stuff like Truthout at the same time they're getting the right wing all aflutter at their epistemic closures being pushed down Google's SERPs, I don't really have a problem with that. The amount of information warfare directed at average citizens from all sides is titanic and Truthout/WorldNetDaily etc. have no inherent right to credibility among people literally unable (through many factors, not all of which are ignorance or stupidity--this stuff also just requires an investment of time to really understand and be able to critically evaluate, and time is at a premium when you are getting paid fifteen bucks an hour or less) to ascertain the prudence of that credibility for themselves.
I do, and I'm pretty left leaning as well. What bothers me is that Google is using human judgment rather than their supposedly infallible algorithms to punish certain sites to the advantage of others. There is a good chance that what they're doing to one side of the spectrum today will be done to the other at some point in the future.
There is a hierarchy of threats to deal with. The information war being directed at everyday citizens to empower real scary dudes is being carried on the back of willful and knowing disinformation campaigns from both non-state and (external) state actors, in the U.S. and elsewhere. The defenses we have are limited, and while I agree with you that it very well may be problematic down the line: if that means I'm in a foxhole with Google, I can live with that for now and work to fight that threat later.
If you have proof that humans at Google are actually choosing which sites to reduce the visibility of in search results, that would be big news, and I'd like to know about it. :)
And nobody stops to think maybe the problem is advertiser funding trends to sensationalist yet substantively bland content, it's gotta be political bias against us, the righteous underdogs.
At a casual glance, the lack of evidence and sources makes it seem like Google's alleged approach of floating more authoritative content to the top is working, at least in this case.
"Truthout, a not-for-profit news website that focuses on political, social, and ecological developments from a left progressive standpoint, had its readership plunge by 35 percent since April. The Real News , a nonprofit video news and documentary service, has had its search traffic fall by 37 percent. Another site, Common Dreams , last week told the WSWS that its search traffic had fallen by up to 50 percent."
"As extreme as these sudden drops in search traffic are, they do not equal the nearly 70 percent drop in traffic from Google seen by the WSWS."
It would be nice to have some independent verification of these numbers, if only because some will doubt their veracity due to the source(s) being considered part of the political "fringe."
We cannot draw our own conclusions unless we also know about changes in total traffic to the sites, in addition to change in number of visitors referred by Google search.
You sell yellow widgets. They catch on. I start to sell them as well. I could very likely steal market share from you.
Even if the numbers are accurate maybe there was just an algorithm update in Google's search.
They have no evidence there was malice and the numbers they have aren't that strong.
That said, nothing surprises me any more. I'm sure there are plenty of intelligence community "double agents" embedded in the tech Giants with any kind of influence.