While losing the White House is a big negative for either of the two major political parties, there is one upside to it: True believers of the party that's out of power are much easier to motivate. They donate money, avidly watch the news and are more likely to turn out in subsequent elections.

Fighting back against Trump has led to record-high fund-raising for Democratic candidates like Georgia congressional candidate Jon Ossoff, who raised more than $23 million for a losing House race. It's also helped groups trying to promote progressive Democratic candidates take in millions for their cause.

Advertisement:

"Resisting" Trump has unquestionably been a boon to MSNBC as well. Last month, according to ratings data from Nielsen Media Research, the left-leaning news and commentary channel reached record viewership levels, with prime-time star Rachel Maddow setting the pace as the most-popular show on cable news.

But all this new energy on the left has not necessarily helped progressive websites. Instead of more visitors than ever before, some of these publications have apparently faced significant traffic declines.

Liberal and progressive sites appear to be among the victims of a policy Google announced on April 25, designed to boost "reliable sources" of information, after Google and other technology companies were criticized for allowing low-quality and even fraudulent websites to proliferate during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Advertisement:

In a blog post, Ben Gomes, Google's vice president of engineering, admitted that the company had been providing searchers with "offensive or clearly misleading content" in a small percentage of results. To combat this, Gomes wrote that Google had "adjusted [its] signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content."

Gomes did not specify just what "adjusting signals" meant in regards to political content. Google and its employees have historically refused to release details about how results are filtered and prioritized, citing competitive concerns and also worries that providing too much information would allow website producers and publishers to game its algorithms.

A number of left-liberal and socialist websites appear to have been impacted negatively by Google's adjustments. Andre Damon, who has written a number of articles on the matter for the World Socialist Website, accuses the search giant of intentionally trying to silence leftist voices.

Advertisement:

“The universality of it makes it clear that this is deliberate," he told Salon. “Our view is that there should be a free and open exchange of ideas, and anyone who thinks that political censorship helps advance democratic ideals is seriously mistaken.”

Utilizing tools from Google, a web analytics company called SEMrush and other methods, Damon calculated that since April, search result traffic to the World Socialist Website has dropped 45 percent as of Sept. 16. He found similar declines at several other left-leaning sites, including AlterNet, Democracy Now!, Common Dreams, and Truthout, all of which have editors who review articles before they are published.

Advertisement:

Search referrals have decreased so dramatically for AlterNet that the publication has had to resort to donations to keep itself in business, executive editor Don Hazen announced in a Sept. 28 article.

"Fighting fake news, which Trump often uses to advance his interests and rally his supporters, is an important goal that AlterNet shares," Hazen wrote.

He continued: "But little did we know that Google had decided, perhaps with bad advice or wrong-headed thinking, that media like AlterNet — dedicated to fighting white supremacy, misogyny, racism, Donald Trump, and fake news — would be clobbered by Google in its clumsy attempt to address hate speech and fake news."

Advertisement:

Citing statistics generated by Google's Analytics service, Hazen wrote that AlterNet's search traffic had decreased by 40 percent since the April announcement, a decline of more than 1 million visitors a month. According to another web tracking company called Quantcast, AlterNet's total traffic has declined from 5.5 million unique visitors in March to 2.6 million in September.

"Google’s undermining of progressive journalism means we have lost a major chunk of audience and as a result are looking at big potential losses in ad revenue," Hazen told his readers. (Full disclosure: AlterNet and Salon are content partners, meaning that Salon frequently republishes AlterNet articles and some Salon articles are syndicated to other publications by AlterNet.)

Writing at In These Times, journalist Julianne Tveten argued that media companies and tech firms are being tricked by a "Russia-Fearmongering-Industrial Complex" which grossly exaggerates the significance of evidence of Russia's involvement in Trump's victory.

Advertisement:

"Mainstream media’s message remains clear: Only the corporate-sponsored center can be trusted," she wrote.

According to Damon, companies have gone too far in trying to filter information for their users.

“The fear over fake news, fake accounts, fake searches is overblown," he said. "Anyone who visited a supermarket 20 years ago would’ve been able to learn about British royalty and aliens. Fake news is nothing new.”

Damon criticized Google in particular for de-prioritizing the World Socialist Website on several keywords that used to bring significant traffic to the site, including searches for the term "socialist." (Which suddenly became fashionable in 2016 with the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders.)

Advertisement:

The site is owned by the International Committee of the Fourth International, a socialist organization founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

“Not only are people being essentially blocked from accessing leftist viewpoints, they are not even being told they exist," he said. “We would think that the WSWS would be an authority on socialism, but apparently that’s not what Google thinks."

When asked how Bing, Google's less-popular search rival, has handled the socialist publication, Damon said he had noted similar declines in referral traffic. "They're just copying what Google did," he said.

A Google representative told Salon via email that the company has not deliberately targeted any particular websites and that political considerations do not factor into results.

Advertisement:

"A site's ranking on Google Search is determined using hundreds of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query, including things like PageRank, the specific words that appear on websites, the freshness of content, and your region," a company spokeswoman said.

The representative mentioned that Google continually hears complaints from left- and right-wing web users about its results. It's certainly true that the far right has complained about Google in recent months. Most recently, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, has called for the nationalization of Google. The search giant seized the Daily Stormer's domain in August after the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that led to the death of a leftist counter-protester.

Other far-right web broadcasters have criticized Google's YouTube service for blocking them from making money on their videos. Over the summer, then-presidential adviser Steve Bannon apparently promoted the idea within the White House of regulating Facebook and Google like public utilities.

For now, the issue of whether legitimate political opinion or analysis, of whatever ideological coloration, is being lumped in with fake news purveyors remains a mostly unexplored topic within the media industry. The one major exception was a Sept. 26 New York Times article about the World Socialist Website's search visibility problems. WSWS is now encouraging readers to sign a petition to "end Google's blacklist" of it.

Advertisement:

Such issues are likely to become more commonplace in the future as the amount of data collected by Google, Facebook and other tech companies grows exponentially every year. While this information hoarding can indeed make for more accurate decisions, that is not necessarily the case, as former Microsoft and Google engineer David Auerbach has written.

"Computers are near-omnipotent cauldrons of processing power, but they’re also stupid," he wrote in a 2012 essay.

"They are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation. IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated two top Jeopardy! players last year, but for the clue 'What grasshoppers eat,' Watson answered: 'Kosher.' For all the data he could access within a fraction of a second—one of the greatest corpuses ever assembled—Watson looked awfully dumb."