Wrapping up the year of disinformation?

I thought Emerald Sky Group had removed its disinformation post, falsely claiming to be working with me and having my endorsement. It’s a blatant attempt to trade off my reputation, even though I’ve spotted articles where their lads are bragging about how good they are. Well, you can’t be that good if you need to use someone else’s name falsely. But I was wrong about the removal: while the post doesn’t appear in their blog index (or a site: search on Google), it is still very much there on their server.

I printed off a letter that will go off to them to make them know they have incurred my (legal) displeasure, and I would happily drag cowardly Wix into it (who, I might add, still hasn’t told me which jurisdiction’s court orders they will respect). I wonder how much three months’ use of my name would actually cost. But pro forma invoices are illegal, too, and I’m not going to stoop down to their level.

As the New Year (the lunar one) is about to start, I wonder if I have made a sufficient strike against the disinformation merchants. There are a few pages left up because of cowardly hosts who write terms of service, then crumble when faced with enforcing them, saying that they cannot be party to the matter but they will then observe court orders.

They seem to do this without realizing that they probably need to be named as a defendant. Oddly, the most cowardly companies tended to be US-based, so for all the bravado in their superhero films (and, in some cases, the apparent bravado of loudmouthed tech CEOs), the reality is considerably more limp. Cloudflare was pretty hopeless, as at one stage their abuse reporting form was made inaccessible to me and their representative, answering an email, refused to action the complaint because it didn’t go through their form. After showing her the screenshots from their own site showing that I was blocked, and a link to their support forum, I am still completely in the dark over the status of the page. But at other times, Cloudflare did the right thing and forwarded the complaint on. And yes, there are many ways to bypass Cloudflare to figure out who the hosts really are.

UK and European firms fared better when it came to having principles and a backbone. Asian firms were in the middle, including one Indian hosting company that posted disinformation itself, again trading off my name and reputation.

Most of the Google search results from disinformation sites have been taken down, thanks to more ethical hosts such as Hostinger and Hetzner. You want to support companies like them, since they’ll likely defend you when the claim is frivolous.

What’s left on the first three SERPs on Google are a post from this blog, a Scoop story, and many posts exposing the lying that had been going on. Those I left untouched, even if many were still keyword-stuffing. I have no grounds to remove the truth. The truth is always welcome, in whatever form, to combat the sheer amount of disinformation, and everyday people need it more than most.

Maybe it’s enough then. I can’t realistically expect a 100 per cent strike rate on removing disinformation, especially when it is funded by Big Tech in some cases.

We’re down to a claimed 85 results for Google SEO jackyan; the reality is fewer in the results at any given time as there are some that don’t mention my name, spaced or unspaced. However, Google has also missed a lot of low-ranking sites so sometimes, a random one from, say, April 2024 might suddenly appear in the results. Given that at one point, the total number of pages was in the three figures, 85, with the first 30 mostly being truthful, might be considered a good result while the search engines generally fail to weed this junk out.

The failures, sadly, have been American (Semrush, Google, and a lot of hosting companies) and south Asian (so-called “SEO” operations in India and, to a lesser extent, Pakistan). Europe wound up being the most up-standing when it came to dealing with disinformation (though Emerald Sky is registered in Chatillon, France), and east Asia barely engaged in any disinformation at all—why bother? What a ride over the course of a year—and a reminder that the gatekeepers of the web are failing us and trust in the medium is bound to decline. Most of us need additional media to back ourselves up to have any credibility, raising the costs of doing business, because an online-only existence can be so easily compromised.


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