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.
Look at the graph in 2012 - it spiked UP a huge percent in a very short time. Then again in 2015 - looks like visibility doubled in 6 months. Was that 'deserved'? Was that 'censoring' other sites?
Doubling in six months is entirely normal behaviour for websites, that's not even especially fast. Viral growth is something seen many times, especially for news sites which can easily grow several multiples in 24 hours if something interesting is happening.
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.