Google “women killed in 2016” - you won’t believe the result

Perking: I've read everything Cadwalladr has written in the last year, and it's bloody frightening. She has a piece today about how she has been targeted by the Leave.EU campaign with a violent video on Twitter:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/19/my-fear-and-fury-in-the-eye-of-the-russia-leave-storm

From the article: " The video was a clip from the film Airplane!, in which a “hysterical” woman is told to calm down and then hit, repeatedly, around the head. The woman – my face photoshopped in – was me. And, as the Russian national anthem played, a line of people queued up to take their turn. The last person in the line had a gun."

Twitter has refused to take the video down, apparently. But look at how blatant this is: a clear threat of violence from the people behind the Brexit campaign that also makes explicit their link with Russia.

Some weird shit is going on right now. And that's an understatement.

No more naive than the rest of us, I'd guess.

I can still remember the "Bloody hell!" moment I had reading the first article last year.

Thing is, for a few years we've been looking the growth of the internet and of big data, and thinking "This is really powerful. I wonder where this will take us." And now we can see to whom some of that power went, and what they might do with it.

Apart from that Russian fake "antifa" account, I don't know about funding of TRAs specifically. But if I have a bit of time later, I can a little bit about funding in general. Or you can just read everything Carole Cadwalladr has written in the last year. With a strong .

With AdWords for each account I have, I get £100 vouchers (actual physical vouchers like those fake Netflix vouchers you occasionally used to get in the post) to spend a year on buying Adwords. I think, if I recall correctly the amount goes up dependant on earnings - I wonder if this comes into play somehow?

I'd like to know who is doing this too?

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories but this is some shady shit.

It's possible things have changed since Cadwalladr wrote this last December.

How to bump Holocaust deniers off Google’s top spot? Pay Google
www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/17/holocaust-deniers-google-search-top-spot

Until Friday. When I gamed Google’s algorithm. I succeeded in doing what Google said was impossible. I, a journalist with almost zero computer knowhow, succeeded in changing the search order of Google’s results for “did the Holocaust happen” and “was the Holocaust a hoax”. I knocked Stormfront off the top of the list. I inserted Wikipedia’s entry on the Holocaust as the number one result. I displaced a lie with a fact.

How did I achieve this impossible feat? Not through writing articles. Or shaming the company into action. I did it with the only language that Google understands: money. Google has shown that it will not respond to outrage or public sentiment or any sense of morality or ethics. It does not accept that leading people with a genuine inquiry about whether the Holocaust happened to a neo-Nazi website is grossly irresponsible or that it demeans the memory of the six million Jews who died. But it was prepared to take my cold, hard cash. A Google spokesman said: “We never want to make money from searches for Holocaust denial, and we don’t allow regular advertising on those terms.”

And yet, it has already made £24.01 out of me. (This was the initial cost – it has since risen to £289.) Because this is what I did: I paid to place a Google advert at the top of its search results. “The Holocaust really happened,” I wrote as the headline to my advert. And below it: “6 million Jews really did die. These search results are propagating lies. Please take action.”

I did this via Google’s AdWords programme. This is the bedrock of everything that Google does, its core business: selling ads against search results. It’s this that contributes the bulk of the $5bn (£4.07bn) profit that Google makes per quarter.

AdWords helpfully suggested possible “Ad group ideas” and search terms that included: “holocaust hoax”, “was the holocaust fake” and “did the holocaust happen”. And it told me how many searches a month are made for these terms: all in, 9,480. Or 113,760 a year. Or the population of Cambridge.

All of whom are being informed by Google that the Holocaust didn’t happen. And are being directed to Stormfront, the website where Anders Breivik used to hang out online and whose members celebrated the death of Jo Cox.

Usually very specific search terms bring up Mumsnet threads (on devices I don't use MN or used linked accounts). So it is odd that even with this thread talking about women killed in 2016, that this thread isn't indexing given the priority and weighting google currently give to updated and new sites covering topic. I would expect it to do so an have seen this happen many times with a variety of threads on wide and varied topics.

Very, very interesting SEO tactics at play.

I'm in Oz and the first three or four were about women and the rest were about men.

Apparently no women were murdered in 2017. Not even Gaia Pope.

What are those websites which are listed? Top of the search results and I've never heard of any of them.

I got the result we are complaining about on my work phone using the phone's mobile data connection. I never use my work phone for anything not connected to my work. I do not access MN on that phone. The result has nothing to do with my browsing history on that phone.

And lower down, still page one:

This is chilling. I'm in Ireland, and got the following:

It's a deliberate and targeted SEO bid.

I use a VPN and tried searching from a different European country.

4 of the top 5 results were specifically about transwomen (and 6 of the top 10).

I'm getting 8 results out of 10 about trans people. Similar on other devices/accounts I've tried.

This saddens me. Not content with the subjugation of women, now men claim to become women. This is nuts. Sex is fixed. Gender is made up.

WTAF?! What the hell is going on with the world? This is so fucked up.

OK, doesn't sound like it's location making the difference then.

yes i'm in uk

Just tried the search in Bing, only one result for the murder of transwomen and that is the last result on the page.

I am in the UK.

I've tried searching while logged out, and also using my work tablet and account, but I got similar results. Anyway, if it was only influenced by previous searches it wouldn't affect one specific term, all similar terms would be affected too.

Is everybody on this thread in the UK right now, while they're searching?

I don't know what difference that might make, but thought it worth asking.

this is really interesting, as when I did it, I couldn't see what your problem was based on my results page.
Top 3 articles about women, 1st one was "men killed 900 women in 6 years"
4 articles on the whole page were about trans, the rest (8) were women and domestic violence.
The related searches as the bottom of the page (8 of them) were all about women, domestic violence and honour killings)

So the google must also be geared to you and your searches.

I don't think the right are safe from division. Both Trump and Brexit are causing major breeches. And both are alleged to have been influenced by external actors.

Suggest - gah, I think my autocorrect has been gamed to make me look like a fool.