Data Void Exploitation

What it is

Filling search terms that have little or no credible content — breaking-news names, obscure phrases, newly coined terms — with manipulative material so that anyone who searches finds only the manipulator's answer.

How it works

Real-world examples

• •Within hours of the November 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting, 4chan users seeded posts and video titles tying the shooter's name to antifa, so that early searches for the name returned that fabricated frame, a case Golebiewski and boyd use as their opening example.
• •Dylann Roof wrote in his 2015 manifesto that a search for black on white crime led him to a white-supremacist site — a problematic query whose only well-optimized results were ideological, illustrating the void the phrase occupied.
• •Commercial actors exploit voids around new product names, obscure medications, and freshly launched cryptocurrencies, where early affiliate and scam pages face no established competition.
• •Breaking-event voids are exploited across the spectrum and by state actors: after mass-casualty events, competing rumors identifying the wrong perpetrator (a Muslim, a left-wing activist, a right-wing extremist) have each appeared in early search and social results before facts were known.

Ethical guidelines

How to defend against it

From the Defense Playbook

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

1. Golebiewski, M., & boyd, d. (2019). Data Voids: Where Missing Data Can Easily Be Exploited. Data & Society Research Institute · link
   The five-type taxonomy of data voids and the Sutherland Springs and problematic-query examples.
2. Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information. Teachers College Record, 121(11)
   Lateral reading as the defense that professional fact-checkers use instead of evaluating a page on its own terms.