We just figured out why traffic to @themarkup has been spiking.— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) July 27, 2020
Our story about Google equating black girls with porn has made us rank really high in Google search results for porn!
Is there such a thing as algorithmic irony? pic.twitter.com/0ynaUt1TQW
Today I discovered something when I was going through our AWS billing. The Markup’s CDN costs had shot way up starting early Saturday. But I had no idea why.— Simon Fondrie-Teitler (@varlogsimon) July 27, 2020
I didn’t see any code changes that would have obviously contributed to the spike. I then checked our analytics (we only collect raw hits) and noticed a huge spike on our latest article starting early Saturday.— Simon Fondrie-Teitler (@varlogsimon) July 27, 2020
The article (by @LeonYin and @ASankin ) https://t.co/LHKxRK9mBj was published Thursday morning, so why was the spike on Saturday? We weren’t aware of any other outlets linking to it that would drive so much traffic.— Simon Fondrie-Teitler (@varlogsimon) July 27, 2020
I started digging more into the logs, and noticed most of our hits were coming from Google. So I visited the Google Search Console to see what was driving the traffic, where I found this graph of referrals we were getting from search for “porn”: pic.twitter.com/nG0H2SWjK9— Simon Fondrie-Teitler (@varlogsimon) July 27, 2020
It turns out Google has placed our most recent article in about sixth place for that term. https://t.co/39uN2onITB— Simon Fondrie-Teitler (@varlogsimon) July 27, 2020