It was a tragic accident that had repercussions in the local community. A college freshman who was out in New York City late on New Year’s Eve fell onto the subway tracks and was killed by an oncoming train.
News of the 19-year-old’s death spread quickly among those who knew the young man, aka Mateo, from his days at New York University High School and Georgetown University.
As the circle of people who learned the news expanded beyond Zachman’s immediate family, concern and curiosity about his shocking death led many to Google, and in the search bar they found his name and little knowledge of it. I input it.
Mateo Zachman’s subway accident. Mateo Zachman’s obituary. Mateo Zachman passes away.
But instead of answers, those looking for information were faced with a slew of poorly written news articles, questionable YouTube videos, and inaccurate obituaries. Others said he was 29 years old and from Nantucket, Massachusetts. (His family spent summers there, but he was from New York.)
Others made even more shocking claims. Zachman falsely reported that he had been stabbed to death at a subway station in the Bronx. In fact, his family said, Sackman and his friend were fooling around on the platform of Manhattan’s East Broadway stop when they fell onto the railroad tracks and were hit by a train entering the station, killing them instantly.
“There were sites I’d never heard of and completely incorrect information,” said Peter DeLuca, whose son Matthew attended the same high school as Sackman. “I didn’t understand what that meant.”
Still, information was spreading. DeLuca, who owns several funeral homes in Manhattan, knew something was wrong after seeing other suspicious obituaries recently. However, he and his wife soon received a call from an acquaintance who believed Zachman had been stabbed.
The young man’s friends were already grieving. Now many of them were upset. In the hours after his death, his name and likeness bounced around the dark corners of the internet, where profiteers using artificial intelligence tools exploited the anguish and despair of those who mourned him.
“I was looking for the truth,” said childhood friend Devan Mehlish, 19, who was rushing from San Diego to piece together the story. “But we couldn’t find it there.”
“Pirates” chasing tragedy
Hours after his death, friends and family rushed to find out more about Zachman’s death. There were few details available, no obituaries or news articles.
But just as people were searching for information on Google, there were people on the other side of the world searching for exactly the same kind of repercussions that Zachman’s death caused.
Faisal Sher Khan, an Internet marketer from India, knew nothing about Zachman. But suddenly enough people were searching for “Mateo Zachman” and his name was pushed up the list of trending topics on Google search, which Mr. Khan was monitoring as part of his digital money-making scheme. .
For Khan, the increased interest meant that an audience for online content that didn’t yet exist was rapidly growing before his eyes. He was ready to deliver it.
Khan, 30, is part of a booming cottage industry online. In this cottage industry, an enterprising person takes advantage of the information vacuum after a sudden tragedy to increase his web traffic to hastily put together articles and YouTube videos.
These so-called obituary pirates seem to know about the deaths of ordinary Americans long before they are publicly reported elsewhere.
Mr. Khan owns the FSK Hub website, which the New York Times identified as the first site to post about Mr. Zachman’s death, and agreed to explain Mr. Khan’s process to the Times.
Khan has spent the past five years building an online advertising business with websites specializing in celebrity news and technology reviews. But he said obituaries are a big part of his content farm.
He works from his living room in New Delhi and closely monitors Google Trends for activity related to scary keywords like death, accident, and death.
Google allows anyone to track search term usage trends as narrow as the last hour. When Khan searches for these keywords in his Google Trends, the company shows what people searching for these terms are currently actively searching for.
Mateo Zachman’s subway accident. Mateo Zachman’s obituary. Mateo Zachman passes away.
This search for truth facilitated the flow of misinformation to those conducting the search.
Khan was able to deduce how Zachman died based on related searches such as “subway accident.” Mr. Khan then did a cursory search for his biographical information on the Internet and was able to land on Mr. Zachman’s LinkedIn page detailing his work history. Finally, he was able to prompt his AI tool, called Large Language Model, to create a short article.
“Articles should be written in a conversational style, using personal pronouns, rhetorical questions, and analogies to engage the reader,” says a language model aimed at incorrectly published on FSK Hub. one of the prompts said.
As a result of his efforts, Khan said he earns thousands of dollars each month from Google’s advertising network, which uses numerous websites. However, his internet marketing expert suggested that a more likely estimate would be less than $100 per month. Experts say articles such as Zachman’s obituary sell for only one to two pennies a month.
“Money is not my priority,” Khan said in an interview. He described himself as an “avid equestrian” who enjoyed riding horses through the wilderness to relax and dreamed of one day becoming a journalist. “Blogging brings me joy,” he added.
In total, it took less than 24 hours for search results for Sackman’s name to turn into a minefield of careless and misleading content.
“We tried to find out what happened, and there were some strange things,” said David Lombardi, owner of a nursery and furniture store on Nantucket where Mr. Zachman had a summer job. Ta. “I just stopped and thought, ‘This isn’t right.'”
growing problem
When a loved one dies, everyone wants their memory to be treated with dignity. A machine-generated obituary is the opposite.
What the Zackmans went through is becoming increasingly common for families, according to numerous complaints posted online and interviews with people who have endured eerily similar ordeals.
They were alarmed to see fake obituaries posted before official announcements and news articles. They were outraged to read unsubstantiated speculation about possible causes of death in AI-generated articles. And they were disappointed that nothing seemed to be done about it.
“It’s so predatory that it’s horrifying and disturbing,” said Chris Silver Smith, a digital marketing consultant in Austin, Texas, who lost his brother-in-law in a car accident in September.
People trust that they can rely on Google not only for news about someone’s death, but also for information about funerals and donations to grieving families.
However, many now walk away feeling anxious, angry, or even fearful that they have been exposed to digital fraud or malware.
Peggy Hammond, 54, a teacher in Birmingham, Alabama, said: “It felt like I clicked on something that made my phone explode.” This month, I panicked after seeing some questionable articles and started deleting applications. About the death of an acquaintance. “This makes me no longer able to trust Google.”
For now, there appear to be few options for those who want these fake obituaries removed.
In August, Audrey Wade, a 27-year-old graduate student in Salt Lake City, filed dozens of complaints with Google about websites and YouTube videos targeting her friend who died unexpectedly. However, she received no response from her and her content was not removed.
“They created this platform with all the unforeseen possibilities, so they have a responsibility to better manage its use and abuse,” she said.
Although the obituary was published on other search engines, including Microsoft Bing, Google played a unique role in spreading news about Sackman across the Internet.
Google Trends has revealed terms that Internet marketers like Khan can use. A Google search spread the obituary for Zachman’s family and friends to find. YouTube, which is owned by Google, allowed creators to spread falsehoods about Sackman to a variety of audiences. And most obituary websites displayed ads powered by Google, generating revenue for the website owner and her Google.
A Google spokesperson said the company recognizes that search results can be flooded with low-quality obituaries after someone dies, and is looking at ways to address that.
The company points to policies that penalize websites if they use automation, including AI, and upcoming changes to Google Trends will reduce the likelihood of lesser-known names being highlighted. He said he was deaf.
“Google always aims to uncover high-quality information, but data gaps are a known challenge for all search engines,” a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We understand how distressing this content is and are working to release updates that will significantly improve search results for queries like this.”
Google removed several YouTube videos about Zachman and disabled advertising on many obituary websites following inquiries from the Times.
After the pirates moved
Zachman made the most of his only semester at Georgetown. According to the school’s newspaper, The Hoya, which published the first legitimate news story about his death on January 19, he joined the university’s marketing association, volunteered with an organization that helps the homeless, and He said he worked at a bar on campus.
“What happened was devastating and a huge blow to the community. We will miss him,” said Mehrish, who described his childhood friend as charismatic and intelligent. “It was a hard pill to swallow. We’ve never experienced anything like this before. It’s a new experience, and a brutal one as well.”
Collegiate, the elite private boys’ school on the Upper West Side that Mr. Zachman attended, sent an email on the night of January 2 saying that Mr. Zachman had died “as a result of a tragic accident.” Georgetown did something similar, but with similarly vague language and no other details.
Families wanted to uncover information at their own pace. But in the depths of their grief, as they gathered at home to try to overcome the excruciating pain of losing their son, Zachman’s parents had already received a message from a family member that posted an obituary online that contained the wrong age, wrong location, and incorrect information. I had heard what was going on up there. Everything is wrong.
“The article published online was completely false,” the family said in a statement.
On January 5, four days after their son’s death, the Zackmans published a paid obituary in the Times, describing their son as “a joyous young man who oozed warmth, love, positive energy, and concern for all.” ” was commemorated.
But by then, the call for information had passed. The false story about Zachman remained, but his name no longer appeared at the top of search results.
The pirates who published them squeezed out a few pennies and left long ago.
