Really disturbing from Paste Magazine:

Now let’s see exactly what’s up here. Together, we’re going to Google the phrase “trump no evidence collusion.” (And because Google searches change over time, I’ll drop screenshots of my results here.) What will emerge is a picture of an invisible hand writing a specific argument, over and over and over. That hand belongs to Robert Mercer, Trump’s data man, who gamed Google and fake news during the campaign and whose return to the scene is heralded by Trump’s war room and bot boom. If you want, you can read more about this crazyAF, richAF, crackpot genius with a heart of shit.

Before we begin, though, we need to establish the fact that this statement is a lie: “There’s no evidence of collusion!” The reason I’m using this specific example is because this highly nuanced claim is the perfect loophole to exploit for misinformation, to shade the truth as lie and get away with it clean.

The truth: no one in the intelligence community and no one on any of the Congressional committees looking into this thing, be they Democrat or Republican, none of them have said categorically, flat-out, “There is no evidence of collusion.” Period. People investigating the case will only go so far as to say they haven’t seen any evidence. Or that there hasn’t been any evidence made available to them yet. But they don’t ever say there flat-out isn’t any evidence of collusion. Ever. Read this if you don’t believe me.

Back to the Googs. Here’s what I saw when I Googled “trump no evidence collusion” on the afternoon of May 29….

How many mainstream sites do you see on the first page? Zero. Let’s go to page two….

Ah! There, buried under InfoWars and National Review and The Blaze and not one, not two, but three pieces from The Free Beacon, we finally find good old Reuters! And, lo: the good old Washington Post! And what about The Failing New York Times? Truly failing. Here’s page three:…

Nope. The New York Fucking Times doesn’t pop up until page five. Ahead of it: Lifezette; Talking Points Memo; The Blaze; The Daily Caller; something called ntknetwork; constitution.com; GOP.com; GatewayPundit; the aptly named NewsBusters; TownHall.com; and, kings of kings, Breitbart and InfoWars.

And when I googled the search term the night of May 31, as I’m writing this, it’s even worse. The Washington Post, which had a page two hit on May 29, is now at the bottom of page four.

Now, to state the obvious, the way those results are ordered isn’t exactly organic. Alexa ranks the NYT at 120 globally; WaPo at 190. Now, what about the illustrious townhall.com, which had not one but two hits on page one? It’s ranked at 9,109. In other words, those first four pages (four full pages of synchronized bullshit) are evidence of a massive and centrally managed strategic misinformation campaign being waged on your brain….

How The SEOsage Is Made

First: Create content that subtly masks the truth.
Second: Shape that content into something people will share.
Third: Make it identical, and make a ton of it.
Fourth: Flood the internet with that content.
Fifth: Flood the internet with that content.
Six: Flood the fucking internet with that content.