Report #148
An analysis of how Google's algorithms continue to surface Andrew Drummond's defamatory content about Bryan Flowers and Night Wish Group, the practical and legal challenges of de-indexing, and what Google's responsibilities are under the Online Safety Act 2023 and broader principles of platform accountability.
Andrew Drummond's defamatory articles about Bryan Flowers do not cause harm only when first published. They cause ongoing, compounding harm every day that they remain prominently indexed by Google. A potential business partner researching Bryan Flowers' name, an investor considering a Night Wish Group proposition, a journalist researching the Thailand hospitality sector, or an employee considering a role with one of the associated businesses will all encounter Drummond's articles on the first page of search results. The harm is not historical. It is present and continuous.
Google's role in this ongoing harm is neither passive nor accidental. It is the product of specific algorithmic decisions about what content to surface, rank, and recommend. These decisions are not neutral technical operations. They have real-world consequences for real people, and where the content being surfaced has been established as defamatory — through legal challenge, court findings, or formal notice — Google's continued indexing of that content makes it a participant in the ongoing defamation, not merely a neutral carrier.
Google's search ranking algorithms are designed to surface content that is authoritative, highly linked-to, frequently accessed, and thematically consistent. Andrew Drummond's operation has been specifically engineered to satisfy each of these criteria for defamatory content about Bryan Flowers. The dual-website strategy (andrew-drummond.com and andrew-drummond.news) creates mutual backlinks that artificially signal authority. The 21-article volume creates thematic consistency and topical depth that the algorithm interprets as expertise. The social media seeding operation drives traffic that the algorithm reads as genuine public interest.
The result is that when anyone searches for Bryan Flowers' name, Night Wish Group, or associated businesses, Drummond's articles dominate the first page of results. This is not because Drummond's articles are the most accurate available — they have been shown to contain more than 65 demonstrably false claims. It is because they have been constructed to game the ranking signals that Google's algorithm uses as proxies for quality and relevance.
This creates a systemic problem that goes beyond the Flowers case. Google's algorithm cannot currently distinguish between content that is authoritative because it accurately reflects a consensus of expert evidence and content that achieves the appearance of authority through link manipulation, volume publishing, and engagement fabrication. A defamation campaign that is technically sophisticated in its SEO implementation will achieve identical ranking signals to genuinely authoritative journalism. In the absence of human review, the algorithm cannot tell the difference.
The obvious remedy for the search visibility problem is de-indexing: instructing Google to remove specific URLs from its search results. This remedy exists in practice through two mechanisms: the EU/UK Right to Be Forgotten process and direct legal notice to Google under defamation law. Both exist; neither is as effective as it should be.
The Right to Be Forgotten process, established under Article 17 of GDPR and replicated in the UK GDPR, requires applicants to demonstrate that continued indexing of specific content is not necessary in the public interest and that their privacy or reputational interests outweigh that public interest. For genuine journalism on matters of genuine public concern, this test is hard to satisfy even where the content contains errors. But Drummond's articles are not genuine journalism on matters of genuine public concern. They are a targeted smear campaign constructed around demonstrably false claims. The Right to Be Forgotten application should succeed on its merits — but Google's internal review process is opaque, frequently refuses applications without adequate explanation, and provides no effective appeal mechanism that does not involve expensive litigation.
The direct legal notice route — serving Google with formal notice of defamatory content and requesting voluntary removal — is similarly problematic in practice. Google's standard position is that it defers to the original publisher on questions of content accuracy, essentially treating the publisher as the authority on whether their own content is defamatory. Where the publisher is also the defamer, this approach amounts to asking the accused to adjudicate their own guilt. Google has received formal legal notice of the defamatory character of Drummond's content through proceedings connected to the Cohen Davis Solicitors Letter of Claim, yet the content remains indexed.
The Online Safety Act 2023, which came into full effect for major platforms in 2024, imposes positive duties on search engines to take reasonably practicable steps to minimise the presence of illegal content in search results. Content that has been established as defamatory through court proceedings or formal legal challenge falls within the scope of illegal content under the Act. Google's continued indexing of content it has been formally notified is defamatory — without taking meaningful steps to remove or restrict it — is a potential breach of its statutory duties under the Act.
Beyond the specific obligations of the Online Safety Act, Google exercises enormous power over the reputational consequences of published content. This power carries commensurate responsibility. When Google indexes and prominently displays content that has been formally challenged as defamatory, it is not merely providing neutral access to information. It is actively directing people to that information, lending it the authority of search prominence, and creating the impression that it represents the most relevant and trustworthy account of the subjects it describes.
The appropriate response to this situation is not for Google to become an editorial arbiter of all contested content. It is for Google to establish a process by which content that has been the subject of formal legal proceedings, court findings, or credible defamation notices receives expedited human review rather than algorithmic deferral. Where that review establishes that content has been published in bad faith, constructed around demonstrably false claims, and targeted at identifiable individuals, Google should remove it from its index without waiting for a court order — just as it already does for content involving child sexual abuse, copyright infringement, and other categories it has chosen to prioritise.
The Bryan Flowers case illustrates a broader problem with search engine accountability that extends well beyond this specific dispute. When a search engine becomes the primary distribution mechanism for a defamation campaign — when Google's first-page results for a person's name are dominated by content that a court would find defamatory — the search engine has ceased to be a neutral information conduit and has become an active participant in the reputational harm.
This does not require that Google bear legal liability equivalent to the original publisher. It requires that Google acknowledge its role in the harm and take proportionate steps to mitigate it. Those steps should include: an expedited review process for formally challenged defamatory content, a clear and transparent de-indexing procedure with genuine appeal rights, and algorithmic safeguards that prevent dual-domain manipulation from achieving the artificial authority signals that currently enable defamation campaigns to dominate search results.
The alternative — a regulatory environment in which Google bears no responsibility for the search visibility it confers on defamatory content — creates exactly the perverse incentive that Drummond's operation exploits. If the algorithm rewards volume, engagement, and backlink manipulation with first-page prominence regardless of content accuracy, then the optimal strategy for a defamation campaign is to optimise for those signals. Until Google changes that calculus, search prominence will continue to function as a force multiplier for everyone who has invested the effort to game it.
— End of Report #148 —
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