How are they shaping public opinion to benefit Democrats?
Whatever the feelings about the source here (I note all their submissions get killed on this site), it would be useful if somebody could point out where their figures are flawed (note they don't just refer to Breitbart, but other conservative websites) - because in the light of the recent clear suppression of conservative websites revealed in the recent "glitch" (1), it's deeply worrying for those of us concerned about free speech.
(1) A thread attempting to discuss that episode here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23912150
There’s three main points I can see
1. The proportion of the traffic to their site from google dropped.
This isn’t convincing to me because there’s no evidence it’s because of their conservative viewpoint. Maybe their SEO was just outdated after the update.
2. The fact that a search for “Joe Biden” no longer goes to their site.
If you look at the numbers they’re quite low already, again they fail to demonstrate that it’s because they’re a conservative website that they’re not getting traffic
3. They have a bar graph that shows that “conservative” websites get a less percentage of their traffic from google.
Two main complaints with this, one the coloring of the bars in the graph is totally arbitrary. Two they again fail to demonstrate that the only thing that’s different is the political leaning of the site
I don’t really feel like they’re presenting the data in a misleading way or they’re lying, but they fail to connect the data to the conclusion. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence and they just don’t have it
Of course, that may be because the alleged suppression of organisations doesn't happen - but there have been enough reports of it on the edges that warrant at least counter-arguments from impartial experts in more mainstream outlets; and the lack of those in the current undeniable culture of suppression of individual voices ("cancel culture") contributes to the feeling of some of us that something deeply worrying is happening.
On DuckDuckGo[4], the first result is undercover video footage of an antifa leader admitting that they are violent and encouraging recruits to do things such as eye gouge. Other results are from both left and right-leaning media. Some claim antifa doesn't cause violence. Others claim that antifa is the sole cause of violence. In short: it's far more balanced than what Google is showing.
You can also look at the political climate inside of Google. The leaked communications are pretty wild. You have people discussing banning recommendations of videos containing "nazis" using "dog whistles" and examples of such "nazis" are PragerU, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro[5]. Look at their internal docs on correcting "algorithmic unfairness" in news and search results.[6] They admit to tweaking the autocomplete behavior for both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, as the defaults suggested (correctly) that Martin was a drug dealer. These docs also claim that factually accurate representations of the world can constitute algorithmic unfairness. Look at the internal responses to James Damore's memo: https://imgur.com/a/S48QN Damore's politics are left-leaning libertarian. If that's the response he gets for making his opinion known, there is no chance that a work environment like that can accept a conservative viewpoint.
Finally (I wish I could find a better source for this), Tucker Carlson describes an email by the head of Google's Multicultural Marketing department. In it, she explains how she used the company's resources & influence to target latino voters in key states with the goal of swinging the election towards Clinton. She even calls it a "silent donation". If what Tucker Carlson says is true, then that is one hell of a smoking gun.
1. https://i.imgur.com/7rqtQrF.png
2. The trick is that antifa doesn't exactly have a membership list, so technically nobody who commits a crime can be tied to them. If you count those who claim to be anti-fascist, you can get quite the body count. For example, one antifa supporter killed 9 people last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Dayton_shooting
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Tacoma_attack
4. https://i.imgur.com/aDNHvNq.png
5. https://images.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/adFf4yhVbUojBIGoAy...
6. https://pv-uploads1.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2019/06/SS1DocD...