Dara Kerr, The Guardian, Feb. 6, 2025
“US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations … Hundreds of press releases about decade-old enforcement actions topped search outcomes, all up to date with a timestamp from after Trump’s inauguration … In virtually each state, no less than one press launch from ICE’s web site appeared in Google’s high outcomes. Nebraska, for instance, surfaced hyperlinks for 2 press releases. One stated “ICE executes federal search warrants in Nebraska”, the opposite stated “ICE fugitive operations staff arrests 44 absconders”. Each displayed their dates of publication as 24 January 2025 on Google search. However when the lawyer clicked by means of to the report, the precise dates of publication have been August 2018 and June 2008, respectively. “I’ve now accomplished it in all 50 states … and I’ve accomplished it in a number of cities. And it’s the identical factor,” the lawyer stated. “All of them had the final replace of 1/24/2025 they usually have been all popping up on the entrance of the algorithm.” Maria Andrade, a longtime immigration lawyer in Idaho, says Ice arrests have been scant within the state thus far. “We had one which didn’t lead to detention,” she stated. “I haven’t heard of mass arrests in any space in any respect.” … ICE had marked all of those press releases as outdated. The company displayed a message on the high of each web page the Guardian reviewed noting it contained “archived content material” that was “from a earlier administration or is in any other case outdated”. … However when the tech professional seemed on the code of those on-line press releases, she noticed a brand new ingredient had been added – a time stamp. “Each article was up to date on the twenty fourth, which was inflicting the Google website positioning to interpret that as a not too long ago up to date article, and due to this fact rank it larger,” she stated. To exhaust all prospects, the tech professional did the identical check with a number of different authorities companies. She crosschecked with the web sites of the Division of Labor, Division of Protection, Division of the Inside and Veteran’s Affairs and located no proof of latest time stamps. “[With Ice] these are outdated articles that are actually showing on the high of the Google and Bing search outcomes as latest headlines, the place no different authorities company is doing this,” she stated. “As somebody in tech, I might interpret that as an intentional play to get extra clicks, primarily on these deceptive headlines.”
