Hundreds paid to promote WE charity on Google
Manipulation campaign used to boost visibility of two positive WE stories
OTTAWA – At least 180 workers were paid to manipulate Google’s search algorithm to promote positive stories on WE Charity and co-founder Craig Kielburger in 2018 and 2019, though who hired them is unclear.
According to three experts, the Google manipulation campaign that was used to boost the visibility of two positive stories about WE, while burying any potential negative coverage, is “highly unethical.”
In two different micro job offers posted to Microworkers.com and provided to National Post by digital strategy consultant Alexander Thorburn-Winsor, an anonymous employer offered on each occasion to pay at least 90 different workers between $0.15 and $0.18 to try to manipulate Google search results in WE’s favour.
Micro jobs are small tasks posted online that generally take a few minutes to complete and pay anywhere between a few cents to a few dollars. Based on the information on the Microworkers. com, both the aforementioned job offers were completed.
In a first posting that appeared in late December 2018, the anonymous employer — identified only as “Member_757096” — asked the worker to search for “Craig Kielburger” on Google.
The person then had to click on a Toronto Star article about a $30-million investment by WE to “build a hightech facility boasting a slate of programs geared toward grooming the fledgling concepts of socially conscious young entrepreneurs.”
In the second posting on May 2019 by the same anonymous employer, workers had to Google “Criag Kielburger + CNN” and click on the link to a March 2019 open letter penned on CNN.com by Craig Kielburger titled “How young people can help to end child labor”.
In both cases, the worker had to spend one minute on the page, then click on one of the links in the stories and submit that URL as proof the job was done in order to receive their payment. The postings say the job takes up to three minutes.
According to ThorburnWinsor, the goal of these steps is to trick Google’s algorithm into thinking the content is particularly of interest to users, thus ranking it higher and higher in future search results.
That, in turn, leads to other links being pushed lower down on the Google result page. In this particular case, Thorburn-Winsor says these campaigns also served to bury at least one negative story about WE lower in Google’s results: an October 2018 report by CANADALAND connecting WE to at least three companies known to use child and slave labour throughout their supply chains.
“By doing that, you’re hiding it to like 90 per cent to 95 per cent of people who search for a given term and are not going to go past the first page,” he explained.
In an emailed statement, WE Charity said no WE employee was behind the micro-job postings, nor did the organization know of the postings or who was behind them.
But the statement also said WE is looking into the practices used by digital marketing companies they have hired in the past to see if they have any ties to the job postings.
“Similar to many organizations where much of their audience is reached online, for several years WE Charity has engaged firms to assist with general promotions including Search Engine Optimisation (SEO),” WE Charity told National Post in a statement.
“In light of your message, we are seeking further information about their specific practices.”
To Robert Burko, CEO of digital marketing agency Elite Digital, paying people to falsely manipulate Google search results is akin to paying for fake positive reviews on a product or buying views to promote an online video.
“This is highly unethical,” Burko said in an interview. “This is doing something bad. This is violating the terms of service of any site that they’re interacting with. As a veteran in the industry, I frown on all of this.”