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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/07/28/election-interfere...

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

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Admittedly I’m biased against that source already, but even then I don’t see how their evidence supports their conclusion.

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 Maybe their SEO was just outdated after the update.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

Thanks for that constructive response (although I'm not convinced, they were useful counterpoints). To be fair, I'm also sceptical of the publication and would prefer other sources - but these issues of free speech (and in particular Big Tech's alleged suppression of conservative outlets) don't get covered in the mainstream - until they are forced onto the agenda like with the recent open letter.

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.

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