Search 'idiot', get Trump: how activists are gaming Google Images

The first page of search results has become the frontline in petty internet protests against Donald Trump

Gavin Haynes
Tue 17 Jul 2018 18.46 BST Last modified on Tue 17 Jul 2018 23.31 BST

Donald Trump is #winning. On the back of an already excellent week where he was gifted a football and impeded a monarch, right now the president is also leaping up Google’s image search rankings, to poll position.

When you type the word “idiot” into Google’s image search, Trump is the first returned result. This is partly because the Green Day song American Idiot was used by protesters to soundtrack his trip to London. But since then there’s also been a concerted campaign to capitalize on that association, and manipulate Google’s algorithm, by linking the word to the picture. Mostly this involved people upvoting a post containing a photo of him and the word “idiot” on Reddit.

This may seem unfair to his most fervent supporters. But if there’s one thing Google is keen to emphasize, it’s that search ain’t fair.

The company has always refused to play God when it comes to their algorithm. Even when the search term “Jew” started returning a hook-nosed caricature in 2004, rather than delete the image, they instead took out ads next to it to explain why antisemitic imagery, as well as antisemitic websites like “Jew Watch”, were appearing so high up the results.

-snip-