Following uproar from conservatives on social media, multiple right-leaning news and opinion sites that had mysteriously disappeared from Google’s search function Monday night into Tuesday afternoon have magically – and quietly - appeared back on the website.
Several sites affiliated with the Media Research Center – including MRCTV, Newsbusters and CNS News – suddenly stopped appearing in search results on Google Tuesday, with multiple attempts to find the sites, including specific searches for article headlines, authors and topics, bringing up zero results.
Conservative editors, columnists and pundits took to social media to complain of similar problems, including Erick Erickson with The Resurgent, who said his website hadn't shown up in search results since Monday. Breitbart News, Human Events, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller reportedly vanished from Google’s search results, as well.
Who at @Google is censoring conservatives? Your search results are suppressing our websites. We demand answers!
— Brent Bozell (@BrentBozell) July 21, 2020
@BreitbartNews @Prageru @realDailyWire @TheResurgent @FreeBeacon @JudicialWatch @theblaze cc: @sundarpichai https://t.co/a74B1Z3S57
Google search has blacklisted numerous major conservative websites by removing them from results in what appears to be a major new censorship purge.https://t.co/c0vqyT6tAC
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) July 21, 2020
It's funny how Google's technical issues only affect conservative publications.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 21, 2020
So what’s this @Google? Let me guess, another “algorithmic error”? One that just happens to affect only conservatives pic.twitter.com/wgiKOSWUzN
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 21, 2020
Interestingly, the issue didn’t affect most if any left-leaning news and opinion sites, including Mother Jones, the Young Turks, Jezebel, Slate, Media Matters For America, CNN or MSNBC (we know, we tried).
Around 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the blacklisted sites suddenly began appearing again. Google reportedly told the National Pulse, which had reported on the problem early Tuesday, that sites had disappeared due to a "technical issue."
Notably, the mysterious "glitch" came just as Google announced it'll begin banning ads from websites they say spread “conspiracy theories” about the COVID pandemic.