sciencevsromance:

maura:

It’s easy enough to do in a story meant to debunk the phrase. All you have to write is, “It’s not a ground zero mosque.” But, what about ongoing coverage? Must you keep using the inaccurate term?

Sadly, the answer is yes, according to people familiar with SEO practices.

“I was trying to make fun of the inaccuracy by referring to it as ‘the non-Ground Zero non-mosque,’” Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon, wrote in an email. “But friends told me that even such negative repetition reinforces the subliminal message [that it is a mosque at ground zero]. This sort of framing is very difficult to wriggle out of anywhere, not just on Google.”

The Associated Press has tried valiantly. On Aug. 18, Tom Kent, the AP’s deputy managing editor for standards and production, issued an advisory pointing out that the AP had deliberately avoided using the term and would continue to do so.

“The site of the proposed Islamic center and mosque is not at ground zero, but two blocks away in a busy commercial area,” Kent wrote. “We should continue to say it’s ‘near’ ground zero, or two blocks away.”

Yet AP’s stories, even when they appear on by Yahoo News, don’t show up on the first page of a Google search or even on the first page of the more refined Google News search. When you search for ground zero mosque that is, unless the headline over the AP content, presumably written by Yahoo’s editors, includes the words “ground zero mosque.”

sinking pit of Internet despair… This Park 51 controversy is just utterly horrifying. The protests against it are the most overtly discriminatory (and the denouncements of the protests, aside from Bloomberg’s heroic speeches, the weakest) I think I’ve ever encountered having grown up in a mainly “PC” era. It feels like we are heading into some serious Our Nation’s Darkest Hours type of occasion.

I think “Ground Zero” should also be rejected in favor of the much more neutral “World Trade Center site” - so it is the mosque near the World Trade Center site.

I see candle light vigils for tolerance in my future….