I don't know (or care about) whether there's any gaming in this specific case, but note that the dates that Google assigns to search results aren't reliable in the first place. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40547453
Did a check on “ice arrests Idaho” and got different results in DDG and Google -- almost all of them pointed to a copy of this article.
Fixed, or perhaps never happened. Hard to know these days
Trump was never serious about his promises, but he’s good at performing it. DOGE seems to be the only real major change now, apparently Musk is serious about it. Trump will probably drag Musk to recycle bin a year from now to make himself more likable.
Recently, the Trump administration took credit for using threats of tariffs to badger Canada into announcing a $1.3B border reinforcement plan.
One problem with that claim is that this plan was already announced in December: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2024/12/g...
If Trump were a tech bro, gaming SEO is what he would do.
Maybe this is what all those nifty DOGE engineers are doing.
Trumps currently on track to deport less than Biden. ICE is underfunded and he realistically can’t get any new funding for at least a few months. Much like his first time around, he’s hoping deterrence etc will at least stop the inflow.
Maybe this changes, but I doubt it. Trumps not really an “America first” candidate - that’s just a ruse to get elected. He is on track to deport millions of Palestinians however.
So all the anti-deportation/anti-border activists can relax, because it's not happening?
At least part is probably due to the main news stories that were happening on 1/24/2025. That was the day that ICE started their "Nationwide Deportation Operation" on immigrants and it was the same day that a judge blocked the order for ending "Birthright Citizenship." Here's the summaries from Democracy Now and NYTimes.
Democracy Now: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/1/24/headlines
NyTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2025/01/24/todays-...
Whether it was the SEO folks changing stories to jump to the top of results based on the news, or whether it was the administration trying to get PR support for the activity, it was likely a response.
At least from a personal perspective, there's a chance that it's not especially "nefarious" on the part of the administration, and that it's mostly SEO folks just changing content to try to manipulate search results and jump themselves back into relevance.