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Can you trust search aggregators when it comes to someone's death?
At the end of December 2023, an online community dedicated to disability and chronic diseases was confronted with the shocking news of the deaths of Brian Vastag and Beth Mazur.
These two men were known for their active positions and contributions to the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities and highlighting the problems of chronic diseases, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, which they both suffered from. The obituaries, which instantly spread on the Internet, caused a wave of grief and hundreds of phone calls among their friends and acquaintances.
However, it soon became clear that although Beth Mazur really died on December 21, 2023, but the reports about the death of Vastag turned out to be false. Vastag himself, at first unaware of what had happened, was shocked and outraged by the effect of the fake obituaries, especially given their fictional nature about the alleged joint suicide with Mazur.
A study conducted by The Verge has revealed that behind the publication of this data are sites that systematically distribute unverified information and use neural networks to create content. They have become the source of false reports about Vastag's death, as they publish obituaries on a regular basis.
Especially acute is the question of the impact of such publications on people who, in search of information, opt for the first Google search results, not suspecting that the data is unreliable. These sites use search engine optimization to attract attention, often luring readers with headlines with errors and false facts.
The practice of "scraping obituaries" is not new and affects not only celebrities, but also ordinary people. Obituary aggregators, such as Legacy.com, have been around for more than 15 years and are very popular abroad. However, the proliferation of AI tools exacerbates the problem by creating a large stream of low-quality and misleading content that these aggregators automatically pick up.
Official funeral service sites often find themselves at a disadvantage compared to aggregators due to search engine algorithms, preferring the latter because of their greater popularity. This causes additional problems for relatives and friends of the deceased, who sometimes encounter false information or even fraud when trying, for example, to order flowers through such sites.
Google, which until recently strongly denied such accusations in its address, declares attempts to improve the quality of search results and the fight against fake obituaries, but the problem remains relevant.
Vastag, for example, found false articles about his death and immediately tried to ask Google to remove them from the search, but received a standard refusal that the sites did not violate the company's policy.
This situation raises deep problems of the modern Internet space related to the dissemination of false information and the still too low responsibility of technology giants for its filtering. It also addresses important questions about the ethics of using artificial intelligence and the need to develop better mechanisms to combat such phenomena.
At the end of December 2023, an online community dedicated to disability and chronic diseases was confronted with the shocking news of the deaths of Brian Vastag and Beth Mazur.
These two men were known for their active positions and contributions to the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities and highlighting the problems of chronic diseases, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, which they both suffered from. The obituaries, which instantly spread on the Internet, caused a wave of grief and hundreds of phone calls among their friends and acquaintances.
However, it soon became clear that although Beth Mazur really died on December 21, 2023, but the reports about the death of Vastag turned out to be false. Vastag himself, at first unaware of what had happened, was shocked and outraged by the effect of the fake obituaries, especially given their fictional nature about the alleged joint suicide with Mazur.
A study conducted by The Verge has revealed that behind the publication of this data are sites that systematically distribute unverified information and use neural networks to create content. They have become the source of false reports about Vastag's death, as they publish obituaries on a regular basis.
Especially acute is the question of the impact of such publications on people who, in search of information, opt for the first Google search results, not suspecting that the data is unreliable. These sites use search engine optimization to attract attention, often luring readers with headlines with errors and false facts.
The practice of "scraping obituaries" is not new and affects not only celebrities, but also ordinary people. Obituary aggregators, such as Legacy.com, have been around for more than 15 years and are very popular abroad. However, the proliferation of AI tools exacerbates the problem by creating a large stream of low-quality and misleading content that these aggregators automatically pick up.
Official funeral service sites often find themselves at a disadvantage compared to aggregators due to search engine algorithms, preferring the latter because of their greater popularity. This causes additional problems for relatives and friends of the deceased, who sometimes encounter false information or even fraud when trying, for example, to order flowers through such sites.
Google, which until recently strongly denied such accusations in its address, declares attempts to improve the quality of search results and the fight against fake obituaries, but the problem remains relevant.
Vastag, for example, found false articles about his death and immediately tried to ask Google to remove them from the search, but received a standard refusal that the sites did not violate the company's policy.
This situation raises deep problems of the modern Internet space related to the dissemination of false information and the still too low responsibility of technology giants for its filtering. It also addresses important questions about the ethics of using artificial intelligence and the need to develop better mechanisms to combat such phenomena.
