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Comment by llarsson | Hacker News Reader

This is truly despicable.

Using SEO tactics to launch an automated slander campaign against common people, who likely have very little other web presence so that the slanderous material som be among the top hits, and then charging them money to have it removed.

Horrible, considering how many recruiters will lazily just Google a candidate's name and blindly trust the results.

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This is one of those instances where it is fortunate I have a common name. The top results if you google my name is some 18th century scottish architect. Hell, there's even another software engineer with the same name in the UK who always appears above me in search results. He had made a name for himself in the RoR community, apparently - I get emails from recruiters who apparently think I'm him (looking for a RoR expert) all the time.

I had the thought that if something like this happened to me I might consider changing my last name to "Smith" or "Jones". Maybe it would be fun if we all did that ;-)

This, along with many of the excesses of cancel-culture, goes away if recruiters/employers stop acting like twelve-year-olds who just heard a piece of juicy gossip. What do we think when someone in their personal life cuts off a friend with the reasoning "I don't mind this person, but what will my other friends think of me??"

It's actually a positive. The commoditization and proliferation of content-free and evidence-free complaints against people will lead inexorably to the distrust of all such things, leading to a birth of a future "evidenced-based" moral culture that will wipe the slanderous, coercive and blackmail-esque "fake accusation" intelligence-industrial complex from the face of the earth, break it into ten thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds upon the waste. The trend is already in progress, and much of the blackmail networks are already undone. The pendulum will swing back. We're just in the the lowest, and fastest, point of its arc right now.

Used to think this but now I’m not so sure. If you aren’t already a skeptic I can’t imagine what else you need. People used to pay the national enquirer for fake news. People want to believe horrible things about other people and will not be encumbered by facts or rationality.

Do you have an accurate pendulum measuring system?

When will The New York Times investigate one of the largest slander laundering operations ever created in the United States: The New York Times?

The New York Times => Wikipedia References NYT => Google EAT score adjusts ranking according to what the NYT/Wiki said. Once "The Network" decides to slander someone there is 0 recourse as all the other sites de-rank or disconnect the individual.

To get an extreme idea of how carefully in lockstep the "Network" acts to collude against actors it doesn't like, look what was done to erase "covfefe" off the internet:

https://www.zachvorhies.com/covfefe/

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