Earlier this month, The Daily Caller reported that it, along with The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and other right-wing publications, had been hit with a targeted campaign by Google to delegitimize them. That campaign involved a special “reviewed claims” link, just for those sites, to left-wing fact-checking organizations dedicated to debunking those right-wing sites. Similar links did not exist for left-wing sites ranging from CNN to Huffington Post to Slate to Salon.
Here’s what that page used to look like:
[[{“fid”:”29426″,”view_mode”:”default”,”fields”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:false},”type”:”media”,”field_deltas”:{“1”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:false}},”attributes”:{“class”:”media-element file-default”,”data-delta”:”1″}}]]
As of Monday, January 22, Google had updated its search algorithm, and that “reviewed links” claim had now disappeared.
[[{“fid”:”29427″,”view_mode”:”default”,”fields”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:false},”type”:”media”,”field_deltas”:{“2”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:false}},”attributes”:{“class”:”media-element file-default”,”data-delta”:”2″}}]]
The same was true for the other conservative sites originally targeted.
Google may claim that the error was entirely unrelated to politics. But just as with other social media giants, such errors only run one way — when’s the last time a major social media platform, from Twitter to Facebook to Google to YouTube, accidentally targeted left-wing sites?
The answer: never.
Which is, of course, why conservatives must always be on their guard. These platforms curate content based on politics, and the bureaucracy is reliably slanted to the Left.