3 min read
The internet never forgets, or that’s what we have always thought, but this incident will open your eyes to how a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) used Google to remove all the derogatory posts and news about him.
The story started in 2023 when independent reporter Jack Poulson covered the story of a San Francisco-based CEO of a Tech company, Maury Blackman’s arrest for domestic abuse in 2021.
Blackman, who was the CEO of Premise Data Corp at the time, was upset that Poulson’s reporting highlighted his legal matters, causing him stress over his public image.
Poulson described concerning elements of the arrest report, even though charges were eventually dropped after Blackman’s girlfriend denied her allegations, the incident damaged his public image.
Mr.Blackman had previously attempted to stifle coverage through lawsuits and DMCA takedowns, but it seemed that he was also attempting to influence Google’s search functions.
Poulson noticed the scam when he discovered that, although his article about Blackman could be found by its precise title, it had disappeared from Google search results.
In June, Poulson wrote to the Freedom of the Press Foundation to inform that the article had somehow disappeared from search results on Google.
After conducting an investigation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) found that Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool, which was intended to assist users in reporting out-of-date or incorrect links, had been abused.
Normally, this tool lets users ask for search results to be updated or removed, but a bad actor took advantage of a flaw in its implementation to get Google to remove mentions of Blackman’s arrest from its index.
According to the investigation, the bug allowed submitters to change the capitalization of URLs, such as “Anatomy” to “AnAtomy.” This caused Google’s crawler to interpret the page as a 404 error and de-index the legitimate content.
Blackman or someone working for him frequently employed this technique between May and June 2025 to censor a number of articles, including Poulson’s reporting and other Substack posts.
Ironically, Blackman left Premise to take a position as CEO of The Transparency Company, a company that specializes in managing online reputations.
Google promptly acknowledged the bug and released a fix after the FPF contacted them about it, claiming that it only affected a small percentage of websites. Google’s unusually quick response begs the question of whether the company knew about the vulnerability beforehand or if it had been secretly exploited.
Given the size and complexity of the internet, where bad actors frequently conceal their tactics, the openness surrounding the bug’s existence and fix is noteworthy.
Because the Refresh Outdated Content tool does not record the identities of requesters, it is challenging to identify the person who took advantage of the vulnerability.
However, the event highlights how strong search engines can be abused for censorship and reputational repression.
It also draws attention to a larger issue regarding the control Google and comparable websites have over what information is kept publicly available, posing continuous concerns regarding responsibility and supervision in the structuring of the world’s information.
