I can't prove that what Google did specifically targeted Breitbart but if it was just changes to the algo then we should have seen other popular sites with similarly dramatic drops in visibility. I'd love to see other examples if they do exist
Everything is political in some form after all.
Appetite for stories doesn't drop overnight like in those graphs. You're in denial - Google is censoring search results to try and manipulate your mind.
For traffic to drop to zero overnight when nothing much is happening, and especially for election related terms, is unheard of.
Look, elsewhere on HN there is a story about how Facebook banned Breitbart because they posted a video of doctors talking about COVID, and they banned Trump for saying children aren't infectious: a claim widely made by many scientists. Tech companies are utterly untrustworthy when it comes to Breitbart. They want to erase it from the internet because it's conservative and those firms have hired far, far too many extreme leftists who loathe anything conservative.
I don't have to agree. Perhaps it was 'wrong' before that Breitbart ranked as high as they did earlier.
I can still go to Breitbart.com - no one is stopping me from going there. No one is stopping them from setting up their servers, hosting their content, and doing all that stuff. They don't get as much 'free' exposure via google as they used to. Other sites now get more visibility. So what? If BB kept their 'visibility' in the search index, every search result they show up in is taking space from a different site that might have shown up instead. Why are they owed anything from google? Google changes their algorithms, and there's more content to compete with too.
If we make some sort of assumption that google's algorithms get modified or perhaps simply adapt to the audience's searches, perhaps... there's less appetite for Breitbart content and ideas across google's user base, and them ranking lower years down the road isn't some grand left-wing conspiracy, but a company serving the needs and desires of its users?