PageRank can be a powerful weapon. Like all weapons, the possessors don’t always appreciate its full power.
FlowingData posted today that a Boston designer stole several of their graphics, in a post titled Do not hire this guy.
██████████, a “user experience designer” in Boston, chose the wrong people to rip off. If █████’s work in data visualization looks familiar, it’s because none of them are his, and all of them were featured on this blog.
The evidence is pretty damming, and the guy almost certainly did it.
But the big questions here are (1) is that blog post a punishment fitting to the crime, (2) how is the power to “punish” distributed on the internet.
First, is the punishment fitting to the crime?
On the one hand, content creators are generally powerless to do anything about theft like this. There is no internet cops looking for such theft, no Supreme Court of the internet to deliver a sentence. So it’s understandable that FlowingData would use whatever power they do have: they can write posts to their audience.
On the other hand, this power is awesomely strong. By creating this post FlowingData has insured that any search for the perp’s name will return their post as a top result. Because the blog is so popular, anything they write about is sure to be a top search result.
Possibly forever.
Commenter R. Kane makes a good point about long range consequences:
I think what I’m interested in is this: given the choice between two applicants of similar qualifications one would always choose the applicant without a damning top ten search result. Even in five years. Even if the application was for a short-order cook. (link)
and later
I’m raising the point that not only is his design career probably over, but any career. I think this is a profound shift, and I think it’s almost entirely due to the way search/blogs/comments work. (link)
I agree with Kane that this designer will probably have trouble finding any work in the future. And that is a punishment way out of proportion to the crime.
Second, how did FlowingData get this power to destroy someone’s career? In a word, PageRank.
My tax preparer has no internet presence, and it looks like they may have cost me almost a thousand dollars through negligence. I realized this morning that even with my mediocre PangRank, a short post about them would surely be the top Google result for the firm’s name. Believe you me, I thought long and hard about it!
It feels odd to hold such “power,” especially since it isn’t equally distributed. Not everyone has a blog. Not every blog has the Google juice to get a result into the top 10. But some blogs do, and this is a very unequal distribution of power.
It really is the wild west out there. What would ideal internet justice look like?
(Yes, I redacted the guy’s name so as not to contribute yet another page to search results. And yes yes, I realize that by linking to the original article, I am only further increasing the PageRank of that post, and further pushing that post to the top of the search results. PageRank is a devious power.)
If I can add to the discussion, the problem that I see is that this seems to be an “all or nothing” deal. I think it is probably important to let people know that this guy (I won’t use his name either out of respect for your decision) has a history of going out and stealing other people’s stuff.
As for names, I think that while PageRank is a powerful tool, it is also easily fooled. If this guy uses a shortened version of his first name on his resume, he will very likely never have to answer questions about this incident. If he uses his middle name, the problem is similarly solved. Yes, this would mean a major change to his life, but he was the one who plagiarized in the first place.
PageRank is not so easily fooled. I’ve been impressed by Google on this. For example, a search including “James” will find people named “Jim”, and a search including “Angela” will find pages containing “Angie”.
Others have said “he was the one who plagiarized in the first place,” but I don’t think this means that he deserves any and all consequences. If such an event happened in the past, his reputation would be ruined in one industry, or among one group of people. But this poor guy stands to be ruined for any and all employment forever, save for changing his name completely.