Mentions on Porn Sites: Embarrassing or Proving You Are a Star?

There was an interesting story on Financial Times yesterday about an Argentine actress Isabel Macedo who decided to google her own name after someone let her know that her name appeared on porn sites. The actress was horrified to actually see links to porn content right on the very first page of Google search results, especially because she was working on a children TV show - and of course mentions of her name on porn sites must be totally inappropriate.

But instead of trying to cope with the creators of the content that can be considered as defamatory and inappropriate Isabel Macedo and some of her Argentine colleagues decided to deal with the search engines as they are the reason people are able to find such content at all. To my surprise, when the Argentine stars (Isabel Macedo and football star Diego Maradona) got to know about such situations, they decided they would sue the search engines - Google and Yahoo - for giving this content such a prominent placement and visibility. As a result, Google and Yahoo are now facing law suits from 144 celebrities in the country.

So as a temporary measure until the cases are settled Yahoo Argentina has chosen to restrict access to some of the search results - and all you get when searching for Maradona is the fact that there are almost 76 million results for the search term - and virtually no search results with the only exception for Yahoo News stories, obviously because the Yahoo News sources can be fully trusted.

The irony is that all the objectionable results can easily be found when doing the same search on the main Yahoo site - Yahoo.com. What’s more, I have a feeling that if the celebrities involved in the situation will have their businesses damaged if their online properties are used for promotion or any sales as people will not be able to find anything at all in Argentina.

Of course it is the usual issue of blaming the messenger as a search engine is only supposed to index and select the relevant content - not be liable for creation of the content. But the plaintiffs in Argentina claim that while a search engine analyzes the content of a web page that will later appear in search results for a particular term, there must be ways to also find out that the content of this page is not appropriate.

But of course it is quite difficult to expect a search engine to fully engage in determining both what is legal in every given country (Google actually censors Nazi propaganda in Germany and overall limits what Chinese users get in the search results) and protecting users from being exposed to such content. And while a country can make local internet service providers block access to certain websites - which we often see in countries like China or Egypt - it is quite difficult to expect search engines to communicate with some citizens of a certain country who are not happy about what they see when searching for their own names.

But I wanted to mention that usually when a name of a celebrity begins to appear on adult sites (and in subject lines of spam emails inviting us to see various female and male stars naked a few times a day), it should really be considered as a yet another sign of popularity for this person as no one would want to use your name to draw visitors to an adult site if no one knows your name at all.

And if you are actually unhappy about any site that you see in the search results (no matter if you are a celebrity, a web celebrity or a regular person who only gets a few results in Google), it is quite strange to expect Google should help you cope with your unhappiness. Instead, there are multiple tools that allow you to both track mentions of your name on all types of web sites and various measure that allow you to have inappropriate content removed. Just consult a professional in online reputation management or make your agent learn how to handle such tools - it’s definitely more efficient than suing Google. And you will surely have more reasons to worry about your popularity when your name does not appear on the adult sites, that’s for sure.