Why are fake obituaries cluttering Google — and upsetting loved ones?
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fake obituaries have become an online trend. They exploit tragedy for profit and have raised concerns about the reliability of search engines. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali discussed the problem with reporter Mia Sato of The Verge. Her investigation uncovered a network of websites generating this content using search engine optimization, or SEO, tactics. Sato also covered the story of Brian Vastag, a journalist who experienced this abuse when he read his own fake obituary along with that of his ex-wife, who did actually pass away.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How and why obituaries are being turned into clickbate. |
| 0:06.0 | From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm Lelie Jamelli. Today a deep dive into the growing online trend involving what's known as obituaries spam. |
| 0:26.3 | It's powered by a sprawling network of websites churning out AI-generated obituaries about people |
| 0:32.2 | who have died. And when their names are |
| 0:34.1 | searched online, those articles clutter the results. As The Verge has been |
| 0:39.2 | reporting, Legacy.com is the largest and most established of these aggregators, but there are plenty of smaller |
| 0:45.6 | sites with names like Eternal Honoring and In Loving Memory News. |
| 0:50.9 | And you guessed it, there's a lot of money driving this. |
| 0:54.0 | This can happen to anyone, that's what Brian Vastig learned last year when he read his own obituary, |
| 1:00.0 | along with his ex-wife's. |
| 1:02.0 | The Assato, a reporter at The Verge, covered their story. |
| 1:05.0 | Brian and Beth were a married couple at one point and then remained friends very close throughout Beth's life and in late December 2023 some friends of |
| 1:18.4 | theirs got news that both of them had suddenly died and basically Brian was perfectly fine. He's alive and well. |
| 1:28.6 | I spoke to him for this piece. He is certainly not dead. Beth had in fact passed away in December, but online there was a flood of |
| 1:38.7 | inaccurate news articles and obituaries that had claimed both Brian and Beth had passed away and it kind of became this really, you know, doubly traumatizing, doubly upsetting situation where people were kind of like mourning for a person |
| 1:56.8 | that had in fact passed away but then mourning for someone who was very much alive. |
| 2:01.0 | And what did Brian tell you about how this affected him? |
| 2:04.7 | He was really upset. |
| 2:05.7 | He was angry that his friends had had to go through this experience and had been under the impression that he passed away because it kind of created additional harm, right, based on what was already the baseline of harm is like Beth had in fact died and there were sort of articles that were in |
| 2:25.3 | poor taste or also inaccurate about her so like that alone is upsetting enough but |
| 2:32.3 | the fact that there was this double impact on his loved |
... |
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