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"Search chepuda rat on Google" or "don't think of looking for chepuda rat on Google" are messages that have been repeated repeatedly on Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram until this pejorative expression has become a Trending Topic.
And what does Google show? A series of photos and montages in which the Vice President of the Government , Pablo Iglesias. Some are real photos in which he does not appear very favored, others, photomontages in which he is characterized as an unpleasant rodent. Some results that the detractors of the leader of the purple formation are using as a joke.
However, the search results are not just a coincidence. This is a political maneuver.
"This is a derivation of the practice known as Google Bombing, " explains Seo consultant, Víctor Martín-Pozuelo .
The Google Bombing (Google bombing in Castilian) is a practice that is used in the field of political activism and to harm rivals online. Its objective is to associate certain web pages with negative search terms so that, when searching for these words with a negative connotation, Google will show images or the web page of the person or institution that has been a victim of this campaign .
Finding a person when looking a priori for images of rodents with deformed backs is puzzling and raises the question of how Google has come to the conclusion that these are the photos to show.
"Rata chepuda is a relatively new concept for Google. It is not a commonly used expression , nor is it a search that people often do on the Internet to resolve their doubts or learn more about a topic. A very small group of people have written and uploaded images to the Internet called like this and, since there is no competition when it comes to displaying results and Google interprets what it should show, "says Martín-Pozuelo.
"By calling them that we mean that there are people (on websites, forums, blogs or social networks) who have written that pejorative expression in the title of the photo, next to the name, in the link that leads to the photo or in the text that accompanies it . So, Google identifies that if everyone associates these images with those words, they must show those images when a search is made , "says Martín-Pozuelo.
The association between "rata chepuda" and the figure of the vice president has its origin in the autumn of 2017 . On October 25, a Forocoches user referred to the now vice president of the Government using these two words in an open discussion about the criticism that Carolina Bescansa had leveled on Podemos and Pablo Iglesias.
Previously, the expression had been used on the social network Twitter but associated with the historic Real Madrid striker , Raul González Blanco.
However, the popularization of the term is largely due to this discussion thread in the Burbuja.info forum , in a discussion titled "Iglesias's chepuda and terrorist rat."
Burbuja.info is a forum on economic information and varieties that has been more of a headache for the purple formation and its leader, Pablo Iglesias . During this spring, it was one of the main websites that served as a platform for the rumor that the vice president had an affair with the advisor , Lilith Vestrynge, daughter of the intellectual Jorge Vestrynge.
At the end of 2018, several Twitter users (all of them with small profiles and with few followers) began to use the expression with increasing frequency up to the present day.
Throughout 2019 and what we have been in 2020, this expression was being used more frequently on and off social networks and several photomontages or images with the title and description of "chepuda rat" were being uploaded to popular meme pages and jokes on the internet.
During these months, the Google search engine has been linking expression and image until, two days ago, several Twitter users with powerful and politicized accounts made the call to search for the expression "chepuda rat" in Google images.
" Now we are in the phase of the whiting that bites its tail . Before a search, Google shows you several results. Google considers the most relevant those in which people have clicked. If right now you have thousands of people looking for Rata Chepuda and they hope to find photos of Pablo Iglesias, those users will click on the photos of Pablo Iglesias , thus helping Google to think that the images it shows are relevant for those searches, "says Martín-Pozuelo.
However, although now it is Pablo Iglesias' turn, this type of attack in Google bombing format comes from afar in Spain. "More than ten years ago hundreds of users agreed to link the SGAE website to the word 'thieves'. Thus, when people searched for thieves on the Internet, the first search result that appeared was the website of the General Society of Spanish Authors ", recalls the expert.
Before against Pablo Iglesias, this type of campaign has also been used politically against the mayor of Madrid , Jose Luís Martinez-Almeida -Google shows his image if someone introduces the insult "carapolla" - and has served to illustrate decontextualized false images phenomena politicians. For example, as EL MUNDO discovered, the iconic photo to illustrate the shortage in supermarkets in Venezuela was actually taken in New York City and managed to deceive Google following the same strategy used now against the Vice President of the Government.
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