Last month, Futurism published an investigation into a company called Brown Brothers Media, which has attracted tens of millions of page views per month by acquiring struggling news sites and turning them into AI-powered content mills. (One of the brothers behind the company, we also reported, has extensive ties to Ghislaine Maxwell, the incarcerated collaborator of deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.)
Brown Brothers Media achieved this extraordinary success by inventing fake journalists and subject matter experts, often outfitting them with fraudulent credentials and personal histories, and using their bylines to churn out thousands of SEO-optimized articles on its network of publications. These pieces were often plagiarized from real reporting, based on made-up personal experiences, or so sloppy that they provided no value to readers.
According to data we reviewed, the operation has sourced much of its audience from Google. The search giant didn’t have much to say in response to our investigation — but after we published, it moved to suppress Brown Brothers sites from its platforms such as Search and Google News. Soon afterward, Brown Brothers Media abruptly halted publication.
Now, Google has updated its guidelines to explicitly forbid the use of fake bylines and AI-generated headshots, saying it will no longer “prioritize” sites that engage in those deceptive practices.
Previously, Google’s rules for creating “helpful, reliable, people-first content” included this guidance:
“If you’re clearly indicating who created the content, you’re likely aligned with the concepts of E-E-A-T [experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness] and on a path to success,” it read. “We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it.”
Yesterday, though, Google added a strongly worded new paragraph under that one:
“However, avoid using deceptive authorship information,” reads the new guidance. “Fabricating creator profiles (such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials to make content appear as if it was written by human experts) is a form of deception. Any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy to both users and our automated quality systems, and is a signal of a low-quality page.”
The addition comes after a slew of reporting on content mills similar to Brown Brothers Media that have also been caught using fake bylines to attract readers.
In Canada, one publication was embarrassed when its nonexistent reporters malfunctioned and started producing error messages, and another was caught plagiarizing the work of other outlets under the name of a fabricated Indigenous journalist. Similar schemes have been uncovered in Florida and Rhode Island.
Zooming out, it’s not clear that Google’s crackdown on fake bylines will be particularly helpful to a media ecosystem that’s facing an existential crisis. The search giant has embraced AI at a deep level, crowding out links to original reporting in favor of error-laden AI summaries that are rapidly choking the life out of independent journalism.