How to Hurt Holocaust Denial Online? Pay Google
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Google says it can’t do anything to stop a neo-Nazi website from popping up as the first result to a search for “Did the Holocaust Happen?”
But a Guardian journalist says she managed to crack the problem alone. It was easy — if you have money.
Carole Cadwalladr paid for an advertisement titled “The Holocaust really happened – 6 million Jews really did die.” She linked it to a Wikipedia page about the Holocaust. After she placed the ad, it was the first result of the same search. Number two was “Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen,” published by Stormfront.
The Google AdSense link cost Cadwalladr £1.12 a click. “If Stormfront is back at number one when you read this, it’s because I’ve run out of funds,” she wrote Saturday.
By Monday, Stormfront was back.
Cadwalladr reported that Google told her the company is “unhappy” with the search results. Still, the company says “while it might seem tempting to fix the results of an individual query by hand, that approach does not scale to the many different variants of that query and the queries that we have not yet seen.”
In other words, there is still no fix from Google for Holocaust denial replacing facts on the search.
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