Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is a technique whereby elements of a website are modified in order for the site to rank higher in relevant search engine results. There are a number of factors that play a role in determining what the top results are for any given terms, including not only the content of the target site but also how many hits it already has. Immediately you can see how a feedback loop will emerge: sites with more hits will rank higher in search results because they have more hits, which results in them continuing to get more hits. This 'popularity' logic assumes that those hits are from real people, but there are also software tools that exist to generate fake hits, explicitly to increase your website's search engine ranking.
So far, so dull - the algorithms that control content on the internet favour things that are already popular and can be exploited, surprise surprise. But what if you don't just want to promote your own page(s) in search results, but actively suppress certain other pages?
Big Tech’s censorship dilemma
A few big tech players - chief among them Google, Facebook and Twitter - control to a large extent what the public considers to be 'the internet', so either removing content from these platforms or getting that content labelled 'disinformation' essentially discredits that content in the opinion of a lot of people. But these platforms need a plausible justification if they're going to either actively remove content, flag it as dangerous/misinformation, or hide it from sensitive audiences. An obvious example of content that search engines have a legitimate reason to hide but not exclude would be pornography. There's loads of it on the internet, but you won't see pornography in your search results unless you explicitly search for sexual terms, and if you have a tool like SafeSearch (in the case of Google) disabled. Most people would agree that Google et al have a responsibility to do this. In the case of content depicting violence or exploitation, Google would want to blacklist it (i.e. prevent it showing up in search results at all) and even report it to relevant law enforcement authorities. Facebook or Twitter would either remove it or place a warning or age-restriction on it. As arbiters of ‘the internet’ they arguably have a responsibility to do this, too.
Then there's the thornier issue of 'disinformation' or 'propaganda'. For search engines this is not something that they have a mandate to suppress the way they do with pornography or violent content, since they are notionally independent of state control and this information isn’t illegal. The same cannot be said for Facebook, who have come under such criticism for allowing dispersal of supposed disinformation (especially surrounding the 2016 US election) that they have implemented strict controls. Advertisers do not want to associate themselves with controversial content, and since Facebook's business model relies on advertising, their wishes (and sometimes the wishes of the FBI) will dictate policy. Posts on Facebook questioning, for example, Covid vaccine efficacy or the official line on the Bucha massacre, will be flagged as disinformation for anyone who sees them, and possibly even removed. The same goes for Twitter and YouTube (owned by Google) - users can very easily get banned for posting information deemed disinformation.
But what about content that isn’t illegal and can’t be claimed to be false, but which shows powerful people or institutions in a bad light? What steps can those people or institutions take to hide this content? This is where the ‘blinding by projection’ hypothesis comes in.
Projection to flood the zone
Non-mainstream news commentators often marvel at the level of projection displayed by western leaders in the statements they make. For example, the repeated claims that Russia was running out of ammunition with which to conduct the SMO (for which no evidence was ever presented), contrasted with Ukraine’s constant requests for more money and weapons: in reality Ukraine was clearly the one running out of ammunition and materiel, but the news has been full of unsubstantiated claims that Russia was running out of these things. Likewise there was much talk about Russia’s big mobilisation of 300k reservists (i.e. people who already had at least basic military training), treating it as if it was a conscription draft; but very little mention of the numerous rounds of actual conscription that Ukraine has been doing, often virtually abducting men off the street to force them to go and fight in hopeless battles defending useless territory.
This ‘projection’ from official spokespeople does not only serve to propagate a distorted or false narrative. The mainstream media’s monolithic reporting of these statements creates swathes of web pages with similar terms, which by virtue of being in the mainstream media, will get lots of hits pretty quickly. Opinion pieces - which may offer slightly differing slants on events, but which will never question the reliability of the statements - add to the mass of content repeating the same clusters of terms. The net effect of these is to push dissenting voices further down the list of search results for those terms, which has the feedback loop effect of them staying low on the list. The dissenters don’t have to be censored or labelled fake to disappear from public consciousness; they simply get drowned out by the echo chamber of mainstream content. This dovetails into the point I made in my post about the impossibility of proving a negative - if all the hits you see on the first page of results are saying the same thing, a credulous reader is likely to assume that they can’t all be biased or repeating lies. Actually yes, they can.
‘Antisemitism in the Labour Party’
In the run-up to the 2019 UK General Election there was a gigantic media buzz surrounding allegations of antisemitism in the British Labour Party, and since Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the party, the allegations were that he hadn’t done enough to prevent the alleged antisemitism. It didn’t matter that some of the people being accused of antisemitism were just members of the party (anyone can become a member of the Labour Party) and it didn’t matter how flimsy the allegations were: most of the allegations levelled at MPs were responses to that MP criticising Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which some Jewish groups felt constituted evidence of antisemitism. The allegations were repeated enough that they took on a momentum of their own (no pun intended), often dominating discussion of and with Corbyn. What many people might not have realised, was that at the same time as these dubious allegations were making headlines, there were similar allegations made against Conservative MPs. These allegations were equally spurious (for not being obsequious enough towards Israel or George Soros), but no media fuss was made of them. A search for ‘antisemitism uk’ in December 2019 would have yielded numerous hits relating to alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party, and only a few to alleged antisemitism in the Conservative Party, which would have been far down the list. It’s impossible to say whether this contributed to Labour losing the election, but lose they did.
Ukraine’s problems presented as Russia’s problems
Until recently, searching for ‘weapons run out Ukraine’ got mostly articles like this, although now mainstream news does seem to be grudgingly reporting that the US and Europe ‘may’ be running out of weapons to send to Ukraine (but also that if the US is, then that must mean Russia is too).
Searching for ‘Ukraine mobilisation’ still returns articles like this and this in the top hits, the latter unquestioningly reporting a claim from the Institute for the Study of War1 that Ukraine’s autumn 2022 counteroffensive ‘shocked Putin into a partial troop mobilisation’. A recent article on Yahoo News does concede that Ukraine is responding to the multiple videos emerging showing men being forcibly handed draft papers or taken away for military service - it is also careful to quote a Ukrainian representative saying that the distribution of these videos is “among the provocations that Russian propaganda actively uses in its narratives” - and if you follow the link to the article it refers to, that one says that Ukraine is now on its sixth round of mobilisation. But Yahoo also has a recent article titled No need for mass mobilization in Ukraine yet, minister says.
To find this recent TASS article quoting a DPR official saying that they are capturing Ukrainian prisoners of war as young as 16, you have to search for ‘ukraine mobilisation 16 year old’, which is a specific enough term that the page would never rank highly in a more general search. The reason for that is that none of the mainstream media is repeating the statement, just like they’re not reporting that Ukraine is on its sixth round of mobilisation, so the statements get no traction, and virtually no one will see them.
I strongly suspect that this method of repeating certain claims across the media to keep those claims high in search results and opposing claims lower down, is a deliberate tactic taking advantage of the algorithmic nature of search engines, to suppress and discredit opposing narratives. It’s not illegal; theoretically independent media is free to publish whatever stories they deem important; and it has the plausible deniability of just being ‘what the media does’. It just so happens that a lot of media sources all choose to report on the same statements.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is an organisation frequently quoted in western media, and the BBC often uses their maps in its articles. Its president, Kimberley Kagan, is married to Fred Kagan, whose brother Robert is married to Victoria Nuland, the current Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and previously Assistant Secretary of State under Obama. Nuland is famous for her leaked “f*** the EU” phone call and not-so-famous for being the US diplomat most closely involved with the Ukraine crisis in 2014.