A technical bug in an online reporting tool used to flag outdated content on Google’s search engine allowed unscrupulous web surfers to delete unflattering news articles about their behavior, according to a press advocacy group.
On Wednesday, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) said it became aware of the glitch after one of its articles on a tech mogul’s censorship efforts was removed from Google’s search engine directory on the basis that the story contained outdated information.
The organization said the issue was rooted in a tool that allowed Google searchers to flag outdated or deleted information online. By amending the style of a letter in a web address, web searchers were able to trick Google’s search crawler into thinking an article had been pulled from the Internet.
The FPF became aware of the issue after its article on tech executive Maury Blackman was removed from Google’s search engine on the basis that it contained outdated information. The article detailed Blackman’s attempt to remove unflattering information about his arrest from the Internet, which was made public after a sealed arrest warrant was obtained and published by journalist Jack Poulson.
The arrest was rooted in an allegation of domestic violence; the victim in the case later recanted their statements. Blackman was never charged with a crime, and a California court sealed the warrant, which Poulson says he obtained from a confidential source.
Representatives for Blackman are alleged to have used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to have articles about the sealed arrest warrant removed from the Internet, the FPF wrote in an article last November. Blackman also filed a defamation lawsuit against Poulson, which was ultimately dismissed under California’s anti-SLAPP law.
The November article published by the FPF was pulled from Google’s search engine sometime within the last few months. The organization became aware of it because of a product called the Google Search Console, which allows publishers to receive updates on whether their web pages are available across Google’s products.
In a separate article on the matter, the FPF’s Deputy Director of Audience Ahmed Zidan said the removal was apparently connected to Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool, which is available via a button next to web pages listed in its search results.
During the reporting process, a user can send Google an amended web address that tricked the tool into thinking a web page had been removed from the Internet. Rather than crawling the original web page, Google’s tool would search against the altered web address and, if it couldn’t find anything, it would simply remove the page from its search result.
The FPF manually fixed the issue by re-submitting the article on Blackman’s crusade to Google. The search engine would re-list the article for a while, and then remove it after receiving a new report through the Refresh Outdated Content tool, Zidan wrote.
“Each time our original article was re-indexed by Google, someone submitted a new removal request for a slightly modified, oddly-capitalized version of the URL’s slug, triggering the same process, and so on,” Zidan said. “This cycle allowed the person or people submitting the reports to continuously suppress our article from search visibility — resulting in a game of digital Whac-A-Mole.”
The organization provided an image that showed the altered web address reported as “outdated” in Google Search Console. The FPF said two of Poulson’s articles on the same matter, which were published to Substack, were also removed using the same process.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the issue in an email sent to the FPF last month. But the company said it stood by its Refresh Outdated Content tool because it “helps ensure our search results are up to date.”
The FPF said the response didn’t go far enough in explaining whether Google was aware of the bug or took steps to fix it, though a spokesperson affirmed that users had abused it against “a tiny fraction of websites.”
Google has since fixed the issue.
“While Google did the right thing by fixing this vulnerability, it’s disappointing that the company is unwilling to be more transparent,” Zidan wrote. “Google says that it’s committed to maximizing access to information. If that’s true, it has an obligation to the public to be transparent about how its products can be misused in such a basic way to censor speech.”
The issue comes at a time when Google has faced accusations by some online news publishers of suppressing their content in favor of artificial intelligence-created “slop,” which often includes misinformation and errors.
A “Helpful Content Update” pushed by Google two years ago resulted in the removal of web articles published by hundreds of independent news outlets and blogs, which caused a significant decrease in traffic and advertising revenue.
The issue has since caught up with larger news publications amid Google’s push for artificial intelligence-generate summaries, which leverages written news content to offer contextualized information excerpts. A recent study revealed Google’s AI-powered summaries resulted in 80 percent fewer click-throughs to websites that are dependent on traffic. Some outlets, including Forbes and Business Insider, have laid off staff and restructured their operations on account of the plummeting traffic.
