Googlebomb (yes I am that slow)

I saw this on A Blog Around The Clock, but it didn’t trigger any braincells. My cold meant that I wasn’t following American politics, and this looked like a politics post. Luckily I’ve now also seen it on Barista and it makes sense. A Googlebomb is what happens when people link to something en masse to alter Google results. The most famous one was miserable failure which used to bring up George W. Bush’s page at the Whitehouse website as the first result. The way it worked was that enough people highlighted the words miserable failure and linked to the Decider’s page.

It’s now also being used for bullying. In the case of Jill Filipovic she’s been the victim of a Googlebomb by various anonymous people. The text below the fold is designed to rectify that. It links to various pages of hers in a bid to move them up the Google rankings.

This is a crosspost to effect a Googlebomb, correcting an injustice against a fellow feminist blogger. Jill Filipovic, who blogs at Feministe and Ms. JD, is a NYU law student who has been the subject of cyber-obsession on a discussion board allegedly populated by law students. The discussions regarding Jill Filipovic (and many other female law students) are sexist and sexual in nature, rating the women’s physical attractiveness and fantasising about sexual contact, both consensual and non-consensual. Neither Jill Filipovic or any other of these women contributed, or gave their permission to be discussed, to the discussion board in question.

Jill Filipovic’s name and class routines etc have been regularly posted to this board, and at least one of the pseudonymous board-members claims to be Jill Filipovic’s classmate. Photos that Jill Filipovic posted (with full rights reserved) to an interent photo-storing and sharing site have also been posted to the sleazy discussion board without her permission. This is a horrendous invasion of Jill Filipovic’s privacy, a violation of copyright law, and calls the ethics and character of the alleged law-students participating in these discussions on the discussion board into question.

A major side-effect of an already nasty situation is that the sexist, objectifying cyber-obsession threads come up on the first page of internet search results on Jill Filipovic’s name. To an inexperienced user of the internet, it may even look as if Jill Filipovic and other female law students chose to compete in these Hot or Not rating competitions, instead of having their pictures posted without permission.

This post is an attempt to balance those internet results to point to the significant writings of Jill Filipovic instead, using the Googlebomb tactic and also linking this post to social networking sites (eg. del.ici.ous, Stumbleupon). Please feel free to copy any or all of what I’ve written here to your own blog in order to help change the top-ranked search engine results for Jill Filipovic. If you don’t have your own blog then please at least link to one of Jill’s post[s] listed below at your preferred social networking site and give it the tag “Filipovic” (as well as any others you think appropriate).

I have linked to these sites in this post: Jill Filipovic’s bio page at Feministe Jill Filipovic’s blog posts at the Ms. JD blog Jill Filipovic’s article about these scummy lawschool sleazebags at Feministe Jill Filipovic’s article at Ms. JD: When Law Students Attack