Earlier this month, Futurism published an exposé about a company called Brown Brothers Media.
In the story, we investigated how the company buys struggling news sites and turns them into high-traffic AI-powered content mills rife with plagiarism, fabulism, and the use of fake authors identified as journalists and subject matter experts with fraudulent credentials. (In a follow-up piece, we explored how one of the company’s founders has an extensive history with Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned collaborator of the notorious predator Jeffrey Epstein.)
The preponderance of Brown Brothers Media’s traffic seemed to come from Google. The content farming network appeared to have figured out how to masterfully exploit the company’s platforms with its AI articles, often dominating the very top of Google News’ “For You” tab with formerly reputable publications it had acquired including VegOut, Silicon Canals, and Space Daily — frequently publishing extremely long and emotionally manipulative headlines that crowded out real journalism with many slight variations on the same story.
When we approached Google in the course of our reporting, it offered only a generic comment, and didn’t seem to take any lasting action against the operation.
But after we published our investigation, that appeared to change: sites in Brown Brothers Media’s portfolio are now showing signs of heavy suppression on Google’s platforms.
At present, about two weeks after our initial story, its sites seem to have vanished from Google News, and are nearly impossible to find on Search. Even Google queries for the exact names of the company’s publications no longer pull up the outlets themselves, instead showing their social accounts, discussion about them elsewhere on the web, and wholly unrelated entities that share their names — strongly suggesting that Google has moved to quash the company’s holdings from its results.
Under the hood are more signs that Brown Brothers Media publications are now being squelched by Google. A site-specific search suggests that the search giant is now only indexing a total of about ten pages from the entire VegOut domain, once one of its highest-trafficked properties — all of them static content like its Privacy Policy and Advertising pages instead of the many articles it’s published — in a clear bad sign for any site. The situation is similar at Silicon Canals and Space Daily.
Nearly Brown Brothers Media’s entire portfolio now appears suppressed in this way, from its spiritual publication Hack Spirit to its Europe-oriented Scandinavian Standard. (A handful of its sites seem to have escaped the purge. A publication it operates called MakeTechEasier is still showing up in Google results, as is Ideapod — a social media startup turned digital publisher that was launched by one of the Brown brothers at the home of Ghislaine Maxwell before it was later folded into Brown Brothers Media, as we previously reported.)
Lending further credence to the impression that Google has cracked down on Brown Brothers Media’s operation: the company abruptly stopped publishing in the wake of our story.
The last new article it ran on Science Blog was a piece this past Saturday. Silicon Canals hasn’t run anything new since last Monday. VegOut has not only halted publication, but appears to have deleted everything it posted since this past May, with no explanation. Ideapod updated an old story this week, but hasn’t published anything new since Sunday.
We reached out to Google and Brown Brothers Media for comment, but didn’t hear back from either. We’ll update if we do.
It’s not clear if Brown Brothers Media’s shutdown is permanent or temporary, or whether it operates more sites that it doesn’t publicly acknowledge. (If you’re aware of any further sites it controls, drop us a line: [email protected].)
For now, Brown Brothers Media’s corporate homepage remains unchanged.
“Brown Brothers Media publishes and operates editorial publications read by millions of people every month — across science, technology, food, space, and the mind,” it reads. “Each title has its own editors, its own voice, and one shared standard: write clearly, cite your sources, treat readers like adults.”
More on Brown Brothers Media: How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
The post That Company That Buys Struggling News Sites and Turns Them Into AI-Powered Content Mills Has Halted Publishing After a Futurism Investigation appeared first on Futurism.
