In context: Online censorship can take many forms and due to its dominance in web search, Google has traditionally been the primary target. A recently uncovered case highlights the lengths to which reputation management companies will go, as well as Google's vulnerability to sophisticated censorship tactics.
Someone successfully censored a pair of uncomfortable articles that were previously accessible through Google Search. The unknown party exploited a clever trick along with a bug in Google's own search platform to effectively erase the URLs from the company's web index.
According to 404 Media, the censorship targeted Jack Poulson, an independent journalist who covers technology and national security. Poulson stumbled upon the issue when he noticed that two of his articles no longer appeared in Google Search results, even when he searched for the exact titles in quotation marks.
The missing articles focused on Premise Data CEO Delwin Maurice Blackman, who was arrested in 2021 and charged with domestic violence. Poulson reported the incident to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that defends journalists' rights. FPF's Deputy Director of Audience, Ahmed Zidan, took on the case and eventually uncovered a previously unknown bug in Google's "Refresh Outdated Content" tool.
Users can leverage Google's "Refresh Outdated Content" tool to request updates to search results when those results are allegedly outdated or link to pages that no longer exist. Earlier this year, the Freedom of the Press Foundation discovered that someone had submitted multiple requests through this tool, targeting Jack Poulson's articles about the Blackman case.
Each request referenced a slightly malformed version of the article's URL, with variations in capitalization. After the first request expired, the same party submitted additional requests – each time changing a different letter's capitalization. When Google attempted to reindex the malformed URL, it encountered an HTTP 404 error, meaning the page appeared to be missing.
Rather than treating the error as a simple dead link, Google's crawler mistakenly delisted the correct article from its search index entirely. According to 404 Media, Google later confirmed the existence of this bug but did not disclose how many fraudulent requests had been made to exploit it.
"We would really love Google and other social platforms to be more transparent with advocacy and press freedom organizations," Zidan stated.
Reputation management firms – or even a knowledgeable coder working on behalf of an interested party such as Delwin Maurice Blackman – likely attempted to exploit Google's Refresh tool for some time. The bug, discovered by Poulson and FPF, would have been a particularly tempting vulnerability for censoring valid journalism under the guise of technical maintenance.