Just to follow up on the comments here, this is as likely to be Google's incompetence as malice.

This blacklist is mostly maintained by an automated system that scans sites for content that looks "suspicious" and red-zones them. Not only does Google's crawl bot do this, but browser users are recruited as an unwitting army. In Chrome there is a setting "Help improve security on the web for everyone"; unless this is turned off, every site you visit is scanned for suspicious content and keywords, and data is sent to Google without telling you.

These algorithms are primitive and shoddy and produce plenty of false positives, and many business owners have woken up to find their site wrongly smeared as deceptive, with no warning. There is an appeal process, which also seems to be mostly automated and usually gets you off the list fairly quickly. However, Google never admits wrongdoing; you'll get a follow-up mail advising you of steps to improve your security to prevent future hacks, even if there never was a hack nor any malicious content at all.

I don't know if there have been any lawsuits over this. I'm sure Google has a team of lawyers on the ready.

So far I've not heard of this list being used for political censorship. I would assume there are bigger fish than Vox Day if that was the intent, but then who can say? This is in contrast to Twitter, which does indeed throw up "unsafe"/"harmful" warnings for links to alt-tech sites or to news stories it wants to suppress (such as the Hunter Biden laptop coverage).

Just to follow up on the comments here, this is as likely to be Google's incompetence as malice.

This blacklist is mostly maintained by an automated system that scans sites for content that looks "suspicious" and red-zones it. Not only does Google's crawl bot do this, but browser users are recruited as an unwitting army. In Chrome there is a setting "Help improve security on the web for everyone"; unless this is turned off, every site you visit is scanned for suspicious content and keywords, and data is sent to Google without telling you.

These algorithms are primitive and shoddy and produce plenty of false positives, and many business owners have woken up to find their site wrongly smeared as deceptive, with no warning. There is an appeal process, which also seems to be mostly automated and usually gets you off the list fairly quickly. However, Google never admits wrongdoing; you'll get a follow-up mail advising you of steps to improve your security to prevent future hacks, even if there never was a hack nor any malicious content at all.

I don't know if there have been any lawsuits over this. I'm sure Google has a team of lawyers on the ready.

So far I've not heard of this list being used for political censorship. I would assume there are bigger fish than Vox Day if that was the intent, but then who can say? This is in contrast to Twitter, which does indeed throw up "unsafe"/"harmful" warnings for links to alt-tech sites or to news stories it wants to suppress (such as the Hunter Biden laptop coverage).