“Thousands of press releases about decade-old enforcement actions topped search results, all updated with a timestamp from after Trump’s inauguration”

And I thought that the Anti-Robot project was adding noise. The Robot is a silly amateur.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”. It’s Ice’s made-for-TV moment. Inundating all forms of media, including Google search, with stories of mass arrests fits into a strategy of fearmongering, said Lindsay M Harris, a law professor at the University of San Francisco who specializes in immigration and asylum law.

“All of that is intended to send a message to immigrants to be afraid and that they’re coming for you,” said Harris. “Regardless of the actual numbers, the optics of these mass arrests throughout the country have very real ramifications.” “[With Ice] these are old articles that are now appearing at the top of the Google and Bing search results as recent headlines, where no other government agency is doing this,” she said. “As someone in tech, I would interpret that as an intentional play to get more clicks, essentially on these misleading headlines.”

Read the full article at The Guardian.