This is not 'censorship'. It probably isn't banning, nor is it 'shadowbanning'. Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall. Some win, some lose.
While I understand how Google's dominance in search can have outsized effects on Internet commerce, the writer has near-zero credibility with me based on their writing. Honest people making honest statements don't need to exaggerate to make the point.
Google have a page where they give advice on “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat...
Things like “Provide a great page experience”, “Focus on people-first content”, and “Avoid creating search engine-first content”.
This article reframes it as an unfulfilled obligation and betrayal because ‘Google Promised to Reward Publishers Who Invest Resources Into Content Created “By People, For People”’
This is even more sloppy and could be easily applied to any real censorship, where some (censored) lose and some (not censored) win
If you're "tuning" your algorithm with the goal of blocking all small independent websites, then yeah, you're doing the shadow (if you don't tell the sites about it) banning. By ignoring the intent of the policy and replacing it with a truism you don't really have a terminology counter argument
That is not what is happening here. What's happening here is that someone has built a business that relies heavily on search hits from Google, Google made changes that negatively impact the number of hits.
I'm not trying to minimize what is clearly a significant problem for the author, I'm just saying that misusing words like 'censorship' can water it down to the point that it has no impact.
I abhor censorship. This isn't it.
By the way, if they made changes to filter out travel advice messages (from small travel sites) because they think such messages are undesirable since they hurt their ability to earn money from AI models, than the same negative impact would meet your definition of censorship, no?
The algorithm isn't some mystery formula it is literally what Google decides. There is no someone wins someone loses. Google wants to provide the answers and is taking market share from smaller publisher today and larger publishers tomorrow.
Just like if I stab you it's not a mugging. Words have meaning.
They're upset because they show up in a search _below_ the "AI Overview" which means people do not click through to their site. The search result still occurs; nobody wants to read it in addition to the AI Overview.
Feel how you want about a company making revenue from not intended to be free labor but it's not a shadow ban.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=travel+lemming+visit+peru
And Google gave us a clear and unequivocal apology. Google said our sites didn’t deserve our shadowbans, and that it wasn’t our fault.
Whether Google itself used the term "shadowban" or not, they clearly acknowledged the drastic effect of their algorithms that favor "AI". So we know what he means.
Censorship is active suppression.
If Google was using AI to prevent independent people from accessing independent websites that would be censorship.
Censorship is something that is done not simply the lack of something being done.
First i want to congratulate you on waking up from your 10 year coma.
That statement is no longe true. Nowadays you have to lie and exaggerate to make a point. That's just how things work
It fits 'shadowbanning' to an absolute tee. Without any kind of notification, or any recourse, a switch is flicked to "off" in a single moment, putting a domain on the shitlist. This is now very well documented, including by this post, and incredibly obvious from the graph.
> the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user
(from Wikipedia)
I'm not saying what they are doing is good, just agreeing that it doesn't seem like shadowbanning, it just looks like downranking.
A ban is when you are preventing from participating in something. Google is a service that indexes the internet and provides references to relevant information. Website providers aren't the users here, web searchers are. I guess you could argue that the site was 'banned' from search results, but I doubt that the author would care enough to search 100 pages of search results to see if they were still there, they just care that they aren't a first page hit.
A shadowban is when a participant has been banned, but has no idea it has happened. This came about on certain link aggregation/social media sites as a solution to people being banned and creating new accounts and resuming their behavior.