Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this.

The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”

Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5bn a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query “are Jews… ” is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: “Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.”...

The gradual radicalization of Douglas McAuthur McCain, we're told, is reflected in his social-media timelines. This week, NBC News  reported that McCain, a 33-year-old from Minneapolis and San Diego, had become the first American to die in Syria while fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), in clashes with other rebel fighters.

(On Thursday, Fox News reported that a second American from Minneapolis may have been killed while fighting for ISIS in the same battle.)

"Until early last year, a Twitter account linked to McCain included mostly mundane messages to friends about basketball—how the Lakers suck, comments about the Chicago Bulls—with only a few messages about Allah or Islam," NBC noted. "Then the account went silent for more than a year." 

McCain, who converted to Islam in 2004 and also appears to have used networks like Facebook and MySpace, fired up his feed again in mid-May—around the time that ISIS was publicizing its control over the Syrian city of Raqqa with public executions, and just weeks before the group launched its military offensive in northern Iraq....