All-Source Intelligence
“Confirming that we’ve rolled out a fix to prevent this type of abuse of the Refresh Outdated Content tool,” wrote Google spokesperson Davis Thompson in an email to the author and the Freedom of the Press Foundation earlier this month. “We won’t be able to share anymore on this,” he added.
The email confirmed the demise of the latest variant of a surprisingly simple technique which allowed anyone to quickly and anonymously remove essentially any webpage — including journalism — from Google search results. An executive from a major U.S. publication, who was granted anonymity to prevent possible retribution against their paper from Google, recalled being shocked that they were able to deindex an old New York Times article as a test, after noticing “hundreds of removals” of their own publication’s articles.
A series of attacks on three publications regarding the behavior of Delwin Maurice Blackman, the now-former CEO of the San Francisco gig-work data collection firm Premise Data, were discovered to have taken place between the February 4 dismissal of his $25 million lawsuit against this publication, and the more than $411,000 in lawyers’ costs and fees he was on Tuesday tentatively ruled to have to pay as a consequence. (Substack was awarded $225,809 in costs and fees, the Electronic Frontier Foundation $145,362, and Susan Seager $40,280.)
