A 2016 news report critical of a Democratic political action committee fell from the top results in a Google search after a contractor hired thousands of workers outside the United States to manipulate the search results, the Huffington Post reported Thursday.
The original article by the HuffPost detailed the deceptive tactics of End Citizens United, founded by three former staffers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, to drive up online donations.
And until this spring, the HuffPost story was the second to come up in a generic Google search for “End Citizens United.”
But at that same time, an anonymous U.S.-based contractor paid at least 3,800 workers in countries around the world through the crowdsourcing firm Microworkers to manipulate what stories would come up when people searched for the PAC in Google, the HuffPost reported Thursday.
According to the news outlet, the contractor paid each of the workers 20 cents to click on stories and sites that portrayed the PAC positively, bumping those stories up in the Google search. As a result, HuffPost’s story on End Citizens United wound up on the second page of search results.
Campaigns to influence search engine results for product reviews are somewhat common, the news outlet noted, but one expert told the HuffPost it’s unusual to see one targeting news coverage.
End Citizens United has never disclosed a payment to Microworkers or any other microwork platform – but that non-disclosure is allowed by the Federal Election Commission, the HuffPost reported.
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