The revelations from the Epstein files continue to pile up. In a previous article it was noted that Epstein employed Filipino helpers and servants who could be material witnesses to the crimes of the elite. Now we learn that a team of Filipinos in the Philippines, employed by Ghislaine Maxwell's sisters husband, was manipulating Google to cover-up for Epstein.
Long before his 2019 arrest, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was already working to erase his criminal past from the internet.
By 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was already a convicted sex offender and on probation after a year in jail. Still very wealthy and socially connected, he was desperate to have his public reputation swept clean.
Unfortunately for him, Google was beginning to show results while users typed on its search box. Auto-suggestions would yield "jail" and "pedophile" tied to the American financier's name. References to his crimes, guilty plea and jailtime dominated search results.
Among the 20,000 pages of "Epstein Files" recently released by the U.S. Department of Justice were email exchanges that follow how Epstein turned to Al Seckel, the husband of hte sister of his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, to lead the damage-control campaign.
Seckel, a self-styled "optical illusions" collector, proposed a blunt strategy: overwhelm negative search results with a flood of positive—and in some cases misleading—content until critical links slid out of view.
"I wish I could use all my creativity and powers to make it all go away instantaneously, but I can't," Seckel wrote in an email to Epstein in October 2010. "However, it is not a hopeless case, based on our analysis of it."
The approach relied on a simple premise of what is now considered old-school search engine optimization, or SEO: bury the bad links and boost the good.
"The greater the number of links, then the higher the ranking," Seckel explained.
He then appealed to Epstein's background as a math teacher in the 1970s, long before he was a multimilionaire. "Jeffrey, it's all mathematics, that's all it is, and all it ever will be."
The emails indicated that Seckel hired a team based in the Philippines to fashion a moat of links around websites and pages they created on Epstein and others who share his name. His supposed involvement in sports, science and philanthropy would be a highlight on these new sites.
"Our group in the Philippines is building links and links to our sites, pseudo sites, and the other Jeffrey Epsteins of the world," Seckel wrote.
He argued that once automated web crawlers revisited search results, Epstein’s critics would instead see favorable or unrelated content created by his team.
"Then the old sites will just get moved out of the way. Poof. We just need more links than [sic] them," Seckel said.
The operation was not a one-off magic trick of the "illusions" enthusiast. It followed a playbook common to PR firms at the time, offering "reputation management" services designed to game search algorithms. A 2012 Wall Street Journal report detailed how such firms buried negative coverage for companies and individuals while amplifying positive narratives.
While it sounded simple enough, Seckel kept fixing for Epstein what proved to be a neverending campaign.
"We are quite exhausted because this job is so incredibly massive and intensive, and we are under a lot of pressure to give you the results you would want," he wrote in another October 2010 email to Epstein.
A key focus of the effort was Wikipedia. Seckel forwarded an email from a "team leader" describing how extensive the efforts are for Epstein in the country.
"Philippines are [sic] continuing to do a lot of backend work, with additional work as soon as they receive the articles and photos from Jeff," they wrote.
Repeated attempts to remove or soften referencs to Epstein's criminal records were reversed by other users monitoring the page.
"He has over twenty people with google alerts on him, who go and undo our edits every time we remove material," the team leader wrote, adding that "more extreme measures" might be needed.
The team also Seckel for more funding for the job.
"Once additional money comes in I can continue to start pimping the 'other' Jeffrey Epsteins that already exist on the web, trying to jump them up in rankings," they said. "You've already seen the kind of work effort I will bring to this project, so I'm counting on you to make this happen and provide me the material and funding that I need."
It took Seckel and the team two months to scrub Wikipedia and search results of what they called "toxic" terms.
"We have stopped the hacking on your wiki site, and that was a major effort. Your wiki entry now is pretty tame, and bad stuff has been muted, bowlerized, and pused to the bottom," Seckel wrote. "This was a big success."
The service commanded a retainer of $10,000 to $20,000 a month, or roughly P450,000 to P900,000. Epstein objected to the escalating costs.
"I was never told... that there was a 10k fee per month„ you inittaly [sic] said the project would take 20.. then another 10. then another 10," Epstein wrote in one exchange, complaining about the incremental charges.
To this, Seckel shot a sharp response.
"We were trying to fix up your mess. I didn't create it. Just thought it would be something to help. This was NEVER about trying to pull money out of you, and fact, we have don't everything possible to keep the costs down considerably," he wrote on Dec. 16, 2010.
While his reputation still suffered in public, Epstein was not exiled from his private, elite networks. The cleaned up search results, at least for a time, kept invitations coming.
Documents showed the convicted sex offender still had a full social calendar in the years after 2010, speaking and meeting with director Woody Allen, famed professor Noam Chomsky, and British billionaires Richard Branson and Bill Gates, among others.
He went on to acquire a second private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2018 and entertained charity calls, including a fundraiser for typhoon-hit Tacloban in 2014.
Explosive accusations by former victim Virginia Giuffre surfaced in 2015, helping Epstein's cases return to the spotlight.
It was also the year Seckel reportedly died, with accounts saying his body was found at the "bottom of a cliff" near his home in France.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal charges accusing him of trafficking and abusing underage girls, some as young as 14, across multiple locations in the United States and abroad.
He died in custody in August 2019 while awaiting trial.
The name and location of this operation has not been revealed. Is it still active today working on other outsourced internet shenanigans?
What's more important about this article than Epstein's Philippines connection is what this means for local elections. There has been plenty written about bots manipulating both the 2016 and 2022 elections. Troll farms abound in the Philippines with the sole purpose of manipulating truth.
As social media giants like Facebook and Twitter play cat-and-mouse with coordinated keyboard warriors who spread disinformation, prop up political clients or smear their opponents, historical whitewashing is finding new homes. Pro-Marcos propaganda is now proliferating on platforms like TikTok and YouTube that appeal primarily to Gen Z, ushering in a new era of fun, hip, glossily edited content that is harder to regulate online.
In the global war on the truth, the Philippines is especially vulnerable. About 99 percent of its population is online, and over half find it difficult to spot fake news. President Rodrigo Duterte rose to power in 2016 aided by a keyboard army and online hate campaigns, forever changing the online landscape.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/12/philippines-marcos-memory-election/
And it's not just the Philippines.
Across the Philippines, it’s a virtual free-for-all. Trolls for companies. Trolls for celebrities. Trolls for liberal opposition politicians and the government. Trolls trolling trolls.
The world of Internet trolls — the gaslighting, the fabrications, the nastiness — is now a fact of life in the Web ecosystem nearly everywhere.
But something new is happening here: Experienced public relations experts in the Philippines are harnessing the raw energy of young and aggressive social media shape-shifters.
They are dramatically altering the political landscape in the Philippines with almost complete impunity — shielded by politicians who are so deep into this practice that they will not legislate against it, and using the cover of established PR firms that quietly offer these services.
It is also showing signs of going global — with the Philippines as a hub — as the United States and countries across the world move into another election cycle in the troll age.
“This is what disinformation will look like in the U.S. in 2020,” said Camille François, chief innovation officer at the New York-based social network analysis company Graphika.
Political manipulation, she said, does not need to come from an ill-intentioned enemy state. It can originate with those who have cut their teeth in the competitive worlds of advertising, media and marketing. Social media companies, she added, were caught off guard before — notably in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 — and could be yet again with this new iteration.
“The Philippines shows us trends that are headed this way,” said François, who led a report commissioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigating Russian trolls in the United States. “And, it is 2019, the market is global — so they will find jobs outside of their own nation.”
These ambitious operators now want to turn their country into the go-to place to influence corporate and political campaigns worldwide — using the same young, educated, English-speaking workforce that made the Philippines a global call center and content moderation hub.
The Washington Post interviewed over half a dozen paid trolls, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity and illegality of their work. They offered a glimpse into how Philippine trolls are shaping politics in their country and possibly showing signs of things to come elsewhere.
For the Senate candidate, for example, the hired trolls worked round-the-clock to flood platforms such as Twitter and Facebook with seemingly organic messages of support. Fans leaped to his defense, debated his critics and sang praises of his leadership style ahead of crucial midterm elections that were held in May.
Except it is all an illusion, manufactured by hundreds of fake accounts all meticulously tracked on a spreadsheet.
“This one, she is a fan of K-pop,” said one female worker, pointing to an open Twitter page showing the fake profile of a young, pink-cheeked woman. Buried among her fan posts for bands such as BTS are messages in support of the Senate candidate. The more likes and retweets, the better she’s doing.
The candidate was not elected, but he came close.
Several paid troll farm operations and one self-described influencer say they have been approached and contracted by international clients, including from Britain, to do political work. Others are planning to expand overseas, hoping to start regionally.
“It has all become an enterprise,” said Yvonne Chua, a journalism professor at the University of the Philippines who has extensively researched misinformation on the Internet.
“It has come to a point where you can rely on the Philippines for all sorts of things: trolls, click farms, whatever you want.”
https://archive.is/gqMsS
The Philippines offers two things that are in great demand: 1. Many Filipinos are proficient in English and 2. Filipinos will work for peanuts. Thats why call centers are outsourced here and why NYC has virtual cashiers based in Manila.
Your next order of fried chicken at a New York City restaurant may come with a “hello” from the Philippines.
Virtual assistants based in the Philippines have become a sought-after option for companies who want to do more with less.
Some restaurants in New York City are now exploring this option to keep up with the rising costs of labor, rent and other overhead expenses.
As minimum wages soar – $16 in New York City and now $20 for fast food workers in California – restaurant owners are feeling the pinch.
Beamed on flat-screen monitors at self-service kiosks, virtual hosts from the Philippines are now taking orders at restaurants, including Yaso Kitchen, Sansan Chicken in Long Island and East Village. They welcome customers with flashing smiles — a hospitality trait Filipinos are renowned for.
The company pays Filipino virtual assistants $3 per hour — way less compared to US wages but considered a competitive rate in the Philippines.
Aiming to incorporate fair wages into fiscal accountability, Chi Zhang told Fortune, “We pay 150% more than the average cashier job in the Philippines.”
Like all virtual assistants from the Philippines, recognized as one of the largest English-speaking nations, Amber and other Filipinos working for Happy Cashiers speak perfect English.
Absolutely none of this should come as a surprise unless you are a normie who believes everything they see on the internet and are not a veteran of the Great Meme War of 2016 as well as the skirmishes which continue to this day.
What is important to note here is the Philippines' central role in manipulating online perception around the globe. It's in the same category as the Philippines being the number one hub of OCSAM. As small as it is this archipelago nation plays a pivotal role in global politics and crime.
