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

[Backingvocals]

Even with all the bs we are dealing with right now. This is erasure of women. Who knows how we tackle this?

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.

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.

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

yes i'm in uk

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

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

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.

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

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).

It's a deliberate and targeted SEO bid.

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

And lower down, still page one:

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.

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

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.

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.

I sound really naive but this has really shocked me. Who is doing this? Who is paying for this?

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

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

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?

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 .

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.

I don't think this is SEO per se, it's just that the much of the media and establishment have bought the false narrative that trans people are under attack. Plus their lobby group is very efficient. When a transgender murderer rapist kills themself they'll hold a vigil outside the prison.

When a woman is murdered by her husband, there's silence.

These groups and newspapers like the Independent (which is, incidentally, owned by a Russian) will make a big headline about a transgender person being murdered in Brazil or some such, but a woman being killed by her husband isn't even news (different if she's 19 and pretty, but a 45 year old woman doesn't even flicker).

It's not a conspiracy so much as effective lobbying.

The police and others have bought in to the transgender lobbying, they talk about it constantly. We have to stamp out 'transgender hate'. But domestic violence? That's just something you live with. Like road deaths. Unavoidable side-effect, if you will.

Right. Who's funding this.

So there are multiple groups with overlapping interests.

The Russian regime aims to paralyse and destabilize the US, UK and other countries which might get in its way. It does this by attempting to widen division and internal strife. Putin and friends would also like other governments to be supportive of their kleptocracy (no meanie sanctions against individuals) and of Russian actions eg invasion of the Ukraine. Nationalism, homophobia and racism in various flavours are popular motivating themes in Russia. Russia has plenty of dosh to throw at this - but actually troll farms and botnets are much cheaper than old-fashioned methods of influence.

Another group is the so called alt-right. Basically Nazis with new technology. They tend to have a pick'n'mix from the usual Nazi basket: anti-Semitic now also anti-Islamic, extremely racist, immensely misogynist. Good supply of keyboard warriors. Obviously common or garden MRAs find happy resonance in some of this stable's output. In general, keep an eye on Milo Yiannopolous, Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer.

You might think the alt-right are guys in their parents' basements, but in fact they overlap with the next group, economically very right-wing. These can be US-style libertarians who have an idealogical belief there should be no government regulation - specially no regulations that inconveniently stop them exploiting poorer people. They can be disaster capitalists, who love a good hurricane or Brexit or tech revolution, as it disrupts the existing order and allows them to swoop in and make a quick buck or re-write the rules in their favour while everyone else is trying to catch their breath. Many of this group are, surprise surprise, extremely rich. They're happy to throw money about.

Special cases of the above are US billionaires Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. Mercer père is also ideologically racist and from the tech industry. He funds Breitbart, which employed Bannon before possibly during Bannon's stint in the White House .

Then there there's the so-called religious right in the US. They're engaged in a continuous fight against abortion rights and many aren't too keen on women having access to contraception or men being prosecuted for rape (unless it's the Wrong Sort of Man, obvs).

Then there's the tech giants. Don't know where the balance is between them trying to take charge of the world for idealogical aims, and trying to take charge of the world to make lots of money. I'm sure it will vary. They have reyther deep pockets.

I'm sure I've left some out.

Many of these groups have clustered around the Brexit referendum and Trump presidency, as OPPORTUNITIES for their agenda. The disruption and (in Trump's case) malleability of key players are wonderful for them. They cover their tracks by deflecting all scrutiny as "sour grapes your team didn't win." In the UK, keep an eye on Farage, Arron Banks and friends, Carswell, perhaps the Chandler brothers.

Although I've talked about right wing groups, I'd expect there to be Russian and other funding of ostensibly left-wing groups towards some of the same aims. So that's something to be aware of in coming years. Similarly I haven't tried to see how Islamist extremism fits into this, but it's certainly in a symbiotic relationship with the Western ultra-nationalists and religious right.

Promoting anti-woman transactivism fits in very nicely with the agenda of lots of these groups. The Russians like the division and the distraction from their own activities; the neo-Nazis like the misogyny; the cut-price MRAs like that too; the billionaires like the disruption; and the tech firms like the clickbait. The religios right... they may be on the horns of a dilemma about who to hate most...

That's a whistlestop tour, and just my take. I could be wrong or have missed important chunks, and I know the broad-brush characterisations leave a lot to be desired. And I hate sounding like a conspiracy theorist.

But basically, this is why Russian-owned botnets were retweeting alleged rapist Julian Assange's prolific tweets promoting Catalan separatism.

If you're fighting within a single cause, eg women's rights, the Assange-Catalan thing looks like random nonsense. It's only when you stand back and take the whole view that it suddenly makes sense.

The Boston Antifa people were trolls from Oregon. Most Twitter 'Antifa' accounts are trolls IME.

thinkprogress.org/boston-antifa-russia-tweet-adb3b2ab4918/

Unfortunately there isn't really any distinction between the violent male TRAs and people merely taking the piss out of them.