With news of an antitrust probe, congressional hearings on bias, accusations from Peter Thiel of “seemingly treasonous” cooperation with the Chinese government, and ongoing revelations about leftist employees running amok on the company’s voluminous Listservs, Google has had a bad couple of months.

For consumers of conservative and alternative media, however, one story should provoke particular concern. Reporting in the Daily Caller this May revealed manual blacklists that apply to “special search results,” or all of the other results that aren’t the famous blue links. On that list are a number of conservative and alternative media sites, including Consortium News, which is run by the Iran–Contra investigator Robert Parry, and the website of The American Spectator.

Though this reporter has exposed several of these blacklists — the term is used by Google internally; there is no dispute on this point — it is important to be clear that to some extent these lists are inevitable. It is not desirable, either for Google as a company or to news consumers, for conspiracy websites to show up in Google News. Until their machine-learning algorithms are sufficiently advanced to weed out that material automatically — and it’s by no means clear that would be a better solution — manual blacklists will remain necessary.

But Google has not been forthright about its blacklists. The company’s executives, when testifying before Congress as recently as this July, continue to insist that there is no blacklisting going on. In reality, though, the company has internal guidance about the reasons something may be blacklisted: if content is sponsored or deceptive. The problem is that, as far as I know, The American Spectator is neither.

With manual blacklists, choices are made that in any other context would be called editorial decisions. Adding and removing domains from Google News is not fundamentally different from the work of the homepage editor of a news website. In other words, they are acting like a publisher, not a platform. This has implications for the debate over Section 230, which says platforms are not liable for what gets published on them, and is probably the reason Google is reluctant to be straightforward about its blacklists.