Down the Memory Hole?

[don]

Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google

When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.

Stark evidence of this fact, the result of a European court ruling that individuals had the right to remove material about themselves from search engine results, arrived in the Guardian's inbox this morning, in the form of an automated notification that six Guardian articles have been scrubbed from search results.
The first six articles down the memory hole – there will likely be many more as the rich and powerful look to scrub up their online images, doubtless with the help of a new wave of "reputation management" firms – are a strange bunch.

Three of the articles, dating from 2010, relate to a now-retired Scottish Premier League referee, Dougie McDonald, who was found to have lied about his reasons for granting a penalty in a Celtic v Dundee United match, the backlash to which prompted his resignation.

Anyone entering the fairly obvious search term "Dougie McDonald Guardian" into google.com – the US version of Google – will see threeGuardian articles about the incident as their first results.



Screenshot of results on Google.comType the exact same phrase into Google.co.uk, however, and the articles have vanished entirely. McDonald's record is swept clean.



Screenshot of results on Google.co.ukThe other disappeared articles – the Guardian isn't given any reason for the deletions – are a 2011 piece on French office workers making post-it art, a 2002 piece about a solicitor facing a fraud trial standing for a seat on the Law Society's ruling body and an index of an entire week of pieces by Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade.

The Guardian has no form of appeal against parts of its journalism being made all but impossible for most of Europe's 368 million to find. The strange aspect of the ruling is all the content is still there: if you click the links in this article, you can read all the "disappeared" stories on this site. No one has suggested the stories weren't true, fair or accurate. But still they are made hard for anyone to find.

There might be a case for saying some stories should vanish from the archives: what about, say, someone who committed a petty crime at 18, who long since reformed and cleaned up their act? If at the age of 30 they're finding that their search history is still preventing them getting a job, couldn't they make the case that it's time for their record to be forgotten? Perhaps – it's a matter of debate. But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google.

As for Google itself, it's clearly a reluctant participant in what effectively amounts to censorship. Whether for commercial or free speech reasons (or both), it's informing sites when their content is blocked – perhaps in the hope that they will write about it. It's taking requests literally: only the exact pages requested for removal vanish and only when you search for them by the specified name.

You can still find a vanished Dougie McDonald page if you search "Scottish referee who lied"; it only disappears when you add his name to the search.
If you search any EU Google site for anything resembling a name, you'll see a warning your results may be restricted. Yet, there's an even better workaround which the search giant has left open. If you go to the Google homepage, and look in the bottom right-hand corner, you'll see a link saying "Use Google.com".

Do that – or switch to another search engine, such as DuckDuckGo, which has no EU footprint and also doesn't track cookies – and for now, you'll see the full unfiltered results.

But this isn't enough. The Guardian, like the rest of the media, regularly writes about things people have done which might not be illegal but raise serious political, moral or ethical questions – tax avoidance, for example. These should not be allowed to disappear: to do so is a huge, if indirect, challenge to press freedom. The ruling has created a stopwatch on free expression – our journalism can be found only until someone asks for it to be hidden.

Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal action. Others may be looking for search tools and engines outside the EU. Quicker than that is a direct innovation: how about any time a news outlet gets a notification, it tweets a link to the article that's just been disappeared. Would you follow @GdnVanished?

[shiny!]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

This is about search results being skewed and content withheld without the searcher's knowledge. I have mixed feelings about it. Tools are only as good as the people wielding them, whether that tool is Google or people censoring Google.

What should someone do if they or their business is libeled and that libel consistently shows up in search results? I had it happen to my business once. I couldn't get the offending website to take it down, nor could I afford an attorney.

But Google commonly tailors/edits/censors? search results according to algorhythms known only to them. Search for something like "abortion" "Tea Party" or "gun control" from San Antonio or Phoenix and Google gives you certain results. Hop on a plane, then do the same search in Boston or San Francisco a few hours later using a different computer. Google will give you different results.

I've gotten different Google results for the same query just 30 miles apart, and it wasn't a location-sensitive query. First time was from a lower middle-class neighborhood outside Phoenix, then done an hour later in upscale Scottsdale.

I don't give a lot of weight to an article complaining about the public being able to delete search results from Google when Google does the same thing to the public every day on a much larger scale. Seems like karma to me.

The best solution for now is to use a variety of search engines, and use Startpage if you want Google results without Google tracking you.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

This is about search results being skewed and content withheld without the searcher's knowledge. I have mixed feelings about it. Tools are only as good as the people wielding them, whether that tool is Google or people censoring Google.

What should someone do if they or their business is libeled and that libel consistently shows up in search results? I had it happen to my business once. I couldn't get the offending website to take it down, nor could I afford an attorney.

But Google commonly tailors/edits/censors? search results according to algorhythms known only to them. Search for something like "abortion" "Tea Party" or "gun control" from San Antonio or Phoenix and Google gives you certain results. Hop on a plane, then do the same search in Boston or San Francisco a few hours later using a different computer. Google will give you different results.

I've gotten different Google results for the same query just 30 miles apart, and it wasn't a location-sensitive query. First time was from a lower middle-class neighborhood outside Phoenix, then done an hour later in upscale Scottsdale.

I don't give a lot of weight to an article complaining about the public being able to delete search results from Google when Google does the same thing to the public every day on a much larger scale. Seems like karma to me.

The best solution for now is to use a variety of search engines, and use Startpage if you want Google results without Google tracking you.

I am worried about this. Me (and many others) treat google like a clear lens. But it seems to have deliberately placed points of opacity. Is there any search engine that does not "play games" ? Regarding your problem, it's an age old problem of "free press" which sometimes creates negative and false information about people. I don't know how you could legally control this without taking away freedom of communication. The legal tradition in europe is different from the US. More emphasis on privacy, less on freedom of speech.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

Does anyone know if the law also applies to microfiche, microfilm? Do they keep copies of newspapers on those mediums in public libraries in EU member countries?

[Slimprofits]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

So GOOG appears to have reversed course on some of the Guardian links.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0F82L920140703

[don]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

So GOOG appears to have reversed course on some of the Guardian links.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0F82L920140703

The effects of sunlight?

[seobook]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

But it seems to have deliberately placed points of opacity.

in addition to all the beta tests, personalization, split tests, etc. ...

some of their updates are not only unannounced, but also denied when noticed. here's an article by a guy who had to lay off a number of employees after being "false positive" penalized for well over a year.

and if he didn't complain publicly about it & get media coverage, he'd likely be penalized for years to come too.

Is there any search engine that does not "play games" ?

Almost all search engines rely heavily on HTLM links for ranking the search results. Some of the heavy reliance on links is due to them being somewhat expensive to manipulate at scale & some of it is due to links having an informational (vs commercial) bias - which ideally would make the organic search results more informational to offset the commercial bias of the paid ads in the search results.

And then search engines have guidelines which are selectively enforced (moreso against smaller players - less so against too big to fail) & a lot of the enforcement actions are based on the links. The trick with the sometimes harsh & selective enforcement is that as more people have become aware of it, it has become more common for some entities to intentionally buy links for competitors to help them get noticed and enforced.

If you want a version of Google which is not aggressively localized/personalized & doesn't throw all their garbage vertical ads in there like hotel search, flight search, product search, etc. then there is http://www.startpage.com/

The other major option in the US in http://www.bing.com (they also power Yahoo! & Yahoo! adds other ads / fraternal listings to the result set). Bing is much better at returning literally what is searched for, whereas Google tends to filter out a lot of content which is too closely aligned with targeted a search query & returns a lot more results matching slightly neighboring concepts. The big catch with Bing is their search database isn't as large as Google's & if you want results localized sometimes Bing doesn't do as good of a job at localizing.

Both Bing & Google have plenty enough usage data that they fold it into their ranking algorithms. That in turn tends to favor larger sites like Facebook, Amazon.com & YouTube. Bing is not as aggressive at scrubbing smaller websites from the search index as Google is.

http://www.DuckDuckGo.com is a search startup which is built off of leveraging Bing's search index. http://www.blekko.com/ is an independent US search player which has built their own index.

Few people outside of Russia (and a few neighboring countries) are aware of or use it, but Yandex is a Russian search engine which has a decent English search at http://www.yandex.com ... Inside Russia they have sufficient marketshare to where in some of the biggest markets like Moscow they've tried to rely mostly on usage data & deemphasize the impact of HTML links on rankings. Their English language search engine in foreign markets doesn't have sufficient usage data to displace links like that.

The effects of sunlight?

They were going along in a heavy handed matter, trying to appear helpless. The notification of publishers was widespread, the wording of the messaging to publishers was overly broad. They wanted to rally the reporters into a fit of outrage, but it didn't work, so they had to shift to a more nuanced and reasonable role.

Google wasn't so "helpless" when doing the book scanning, shifting image search traffic to keep searchers on their own site with the full image, scraping user reviews from Yelp & TripAdvisor, letting full movies appear over and over again on YouTube, giving indy music labels ultimatums about licensing at lower rates for streaming music, etc etc etc ... there's a reason many copyright holders view Google as a bigger enemy than censorship.

In the past Google has let ex-Googlers heavily rely on autogenerated content without penalizing them, but other sites which do the same are often penalized. this is now getting more widespread, with the sites Google is algorithmically preferencing using their built in trust to backfill with auto-generated content.

there are numerous entities like Narrative Science and Automated Insights which use software to rewrite press releases & then post those articles on sites like AP.org, Forbes.com, etc.

this past week Automated Insights claimed they'll publish a billion articles this year http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...ries/11799077/

[shiny!]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

I was hoping you'd chime in on this, seobook. I've used Startpage and DuckDuckGo for years. Didn't realize DDG was using Bing's search index.

Disliking Google more and more, even via Startpage. Too often when I'm searching for information it returns pages of shopping links instead. Didn't used to be that way.

I'm also seeing more press releases showing up as news stories lately. Sigh.

[seobook]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

DDG does modify/tailor the result set a good bit, so it isn't really a 1:1 ... but their core initial starting search index is powered by Bing & then they have some human editorial and interface design elements layered over the top of it.

Disliking Google more and more, even via Startpage. Too often when I'm searching for information it returns pages of shopping links instead. Didn't used to be that way.

There's likely at least 3 major factors at play there:

• the folding of usage data lifting up some of the larger branded sites (many of which are marketplaces like Amazon or eBay or such)
• greater usage of synonyms rather than returning pages which contained the terms directly matching the search query
• increasing penalties which tend to hit smaller sites at a far greater degree than they hit larger sites. Panda (largely via demoting sites with weaker engagement metrics), Penguin (penalizing many sites with aggressive link anchor text focus & many lower quality links), manual link penalties (these can take many years to expire unless you go through the reconsideration process & can in some cases be associated with literally a 100% decline in search visits from Google ... and some people who go through the reconsideration request process are so concerned while their cashflow disappears that they even try to remove some of their quality inbound links) & tightened on-page filters (which may demote pages with excessive repetition that are too tightly aligned with a particular set of keywords) ... in addition many smaller players have drastically pulled back on their SEO budgets, stopped link building, published less frequently, stopped publishing and in some cases even removed their sites from the web as the search ecosystem has become less stable

A couple other factors at play (on Google.com but perhaps not as much on Startpage.com) would be larger AdWords ads, increased promotion of vertical search (like product search, hotel search, flight search) & greater localization of the result set.

Some of the above aspects are intertwined. As Google increased their weighting on localizing the search results, that made them confident they were still showing plenty of diversity within the search result set, which makes it easy to dial up their weighting on domain authority & engagement metrics. The spot between a rock & a hard place is being a small online-only business. They've been getting squeezed out of the search ecosystem since the last recession happened. I think when the recession happened a lot of the direct marketing ad budgets quickly dried up with consumer spending & some of the brand ad budgets approved many months or a year in advance kept on spending ... so brand, brand, brand. ;)

Of course there has been some research done showing people tend to trust things more if it is something from a familiar known source. But increasingly larger chunks of the web are a known logo with some outsourced chunks under the hood ... that above article about Automated Insights mentions their partnership with the Associated Press, and of course the Associated Press is partnered with tons of newspapers that syndicate their content. And the Automated Insights homepage also lists Microsoft and Yahoo as clients.

[shiny!]

Re: Down the Memory Hole?

The spot between a rock & a hard place is being a small online-only business. They've been getting squeezed out of the search ecosystem since the last recession happened. I think when the recession happened a lot of the direct marketing ad budgets quickly dried up with consumer spending & some of the brand ad budgets approved many months or a year in advance kept on spending ... so brand, brand, brand. ;)

Thanks, seobook, especially for this.

I'm sending you a PM so as not to derail this thread.

[don]

The Right to Be Forgotten

Let's take a look at disturbing aspects of censorship, in which thousands of references to people have virtually disappeared from the internet following an EU ruling on the "Right to Be Forgotten" in which individuals have the right to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them.

Wikipedia provides the background for discussion.

The right to be forgotten ‘reflects the claim of an individual to have certain data deleted so that third persons can no longer trace them.’ It has been defined as ‘the right to silence on past events in life that are no longer occurring.’ The right to be forgotten manifests itself in allowing individuals to delete information, videos or photographs about themselves from internet records, and thus prevent them from showing up on search engines.

In May 2014, the European Court of Justice ruled against Google in Costeja, a case brought by a Spanish man who requested the removal of a link to a digitized 1998 article in La Vanguardia newspaper about an auction for his foreclosed home, for a debt that he had subsequently paid. He initially attempted to have the article removed by complaining to the Spanish Data Protection Agency, which rejected the claim on the grounds that it was lawful and accurate, but accepted a complaint against Google and asked Google to remove the results. Google sued in the Spanish Audiencia Nacional (National High Court) which referred a series of questions to the European Court of Justice. The court ruled in Costeja that search engines are responsible for the content they point to and thus, Google was required to comply with EU data privacy laws.

Guardian Articles Hidden From Search Engines

With that background understanding, please consider EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google.

[Following] a European court ruling that individuals had the right to remove material about themselves from search engine results, arrived in the Guardian's inbox this morning, in the form of an automated notification that six Guardian articles have been scrubbed from search results.

Three of the articles, dating from 2010, relate to a now-retired Scottish Premier League referee, Dougie McDonald, who was found to have lied about his reasons for granting a penalty in a Celtic v Dundee United match, the backlash to which prompted his resignation.

Anyone entering the fairly obvious search term "Dougie McDonald Guardian" into google.com – the US version of Google – will see three Guardian articles about the incident as their first results. Type the exact same phrase into Google.co.uk, however, and the articles have vanished entirely. McDonald's record is swept clean.

The Guardian has no form of appeal against parts of its journalism being made all but impossible for most of Europe's 368 million to find. The strange aspect of the ruling is all the content is still there: if you click the links in this article, you can read all the "disappeared" stories on this site. No one has suggested the stories weren't true, fair or accurate. But still they are made hard for anyone to find.

There might be a case for saying some stories should vanish from the archives: what about, say, someone who committed a petty crime at 18, who long since reformed and cleaned up their act? If at the age of 30 they're finding that their search history is still preventing them getting a job, couldn't they make the case that it's time for their record to be forgotten? Perhaps – it's a matter of debate. But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google.

The Guardian, like the rest of the media, regularly writes about things people have done which might not be illegal but raise serious political, moral or ethical questions – tax avoidance, for example. These should not be allowed to disappear: to do so is a huge, if indirect, challenge to press freedom. The ruling has created a stopwatch on free expression – our journalism can be found only until someone asks for it to be hidden.

Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal action. Others may be looking for search tools and engines outside the EU. Quicker than that is a direct innovation: how about any time a news outlet gets a notification, it tweets a link to the article that's just been disappeared. Would you follow @GdnVanished?

Cast Into Oblivion

It's not just the Guardian. Robert Peston on the BBC asks Why Has Google Cast Me Into Oblivion?

This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:

Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google: Merrill's Mess

What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 [about the mess at Merrill Lynch] will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe.

Which means that to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.

So why has Google killed this example of my journalism?

Now in my blog, only one individual is named. He is Stan O'Neal, the former boss of the investment bank Merrill Lynch.

My column describes how O'Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.

Is the data in it "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant"?

Hmmm.

Most people would argue that it is highly relevant for the track record, good or bad, of a business leader to remain on the public record - especially someone widely seen as having played an important role in the worst financial crisis in living memory (Merrill went to the brink of collapse the following year, and was rescued by Bank of America).

Big Brother

Michael Krieger on the Liberty Blitzkrieg blog quotes George Orwell "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

Krieger picks up on the Guardian Tweet idea...

Every time an article gets censored it should be highlighted. If we could get one Twitter account to aggregate all the deleted stories (or perhaps just the high profile ones) it could make the whole censorship campaign backfire as the stories would get even more press than they would have through regular searches. Ah…the possibilities.

Interestingly, due to all the controversy, a European Commission spokesman has come forth to criticize Google for removing the BBC article. You can’t make this stuff up. From the BBC:

Google’s decision to remove a BBC article from some of its search results was “not a good judgement”, a European Commission spokesman has said.

40,000 Censorship Requests in First Hour

Paul Bernal, writing for CNN asks Is Google Undermining the 'Right to be Forgotten'?

In the commentary I wrote for CNN the day after the ruling in the Google Spain case, I suggested the result created a headache -- and potentially huge costs -- for Google, and that it could open the door to a flood of cases, each of which would need a resolution.

I wrote that how Google responded to the ruling would be critical -- and the initial signs are that the company's response has already caused problems.

As predicted, Google received a huge volume of requests to have links removed -- more than 40,000 in the first four days after the ruling. The company has now begun the process of responding to them.

In both Ball's [Guardian's] and Peston's cases, many of the stories that they had been notified about did not seem to fall into categories covered by the Google Spain ruling: old, irrelevant stories about people who were not public figures. Ball's stories included pieces from 2010 and 2011 -- scarcely old -- while Peston's covered critical events in the banking world in 2007 -- the ousting of banker Stan O'Neal from Merrill Lynch -- something that cannot be described as irrelevant or not in the public interest.

It looked as though this was exactly what the opponents of the right to be forgotten were worried about: censorship and the rewriting of history.

Was it, in fact, that Google were overreacting -- either that they were, as Peston put it, "clumsy" or that, perhaps, they were deliberately attempting to undermine the ruling by making it seem either unworkable or a dangerous form of censorship.

That Google might be deliberately undermining the ruling seems possible; all three parts of their response could contribute to this view.

Firstly, they seem to be erring on the side of the people wishing for things to be blocked -- and hence they do create more censorship.

Secondly, by alerting about far more search results than are actually affected by the rulings, they create an atmosphere in which people feel more censored.

Thirdly, by the form which their notification to journalists takes, they make journalists feel censored -- and might make strong, important and expert journalists into allies in their attempts to undermine the ruling.

The combination of these three is a potent one.

On the other hand, it is possible that it is simply clumsy, and that these are teething troubles.

The individual cases that have made the headlines have begun to unravel a little: Google has reversed its decisions on James Ball's pieces, recognising there is a public interest. Peston's piece is more interesting.

The assumption Peston made, reasonably enough, was that the link would be blocked when people search for Sean O'Neal, since his was the only name that appeared in the article in question.

But in fact, it turns out that the request to block the story related to a member of the public whose name appeared in the comments on the piece -- the link removed relates to searches for that person. Searching for Sean O'Neal still brings up the article.

Hope For a "Limited Big Brother"


Krieger notes that Google has now received 250,000 removal requests. Should Google really have to filter through every one of them, but only for Europe?

Bernal is sympathetic to a limited form of "Big Brother" writing "The most important thing that Google can do in response to the court ruling is to engage positively and actively with the ongoing reform process of the Data Protection Regime. A well-executed reform, with a better written, more limited and more appropriate version of the right to be forgotten could be the ultimate solution here."

Is a "limited big brother" really possible?

I side with Pater Tenebrarum at the Acting Man blog who pinged me with this though: "The Right to Be Forgotten is their first significant step through the backdoor to enable internet censorship."

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogsp...mxEAR3j7rXJ.99

[vt]

Re: The Right to Be Forgotten

Speaking of censorship, Costco took D'Souzas "America" from it's books shelves, citing "poor sales". (Costco has just reversed this decision)

http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/costco-re...-from-shelves/

http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/costco-de...-dsouzas-book/

This promptly sent the book to NUMBER 1 on Amazon's best seller list (it was already in top 10 before).

http://www.amazon.com/America-Imagin...ywords=america

Meanwhile Hillary's "Hard Choices", which is still on Costco's shelves is at number 88 on the list.Ironically "Farenheit 451" has come out of nowhere to number 39

[dcarrigg]

Re: The Right to Be Forgotten

"Farenheit 455"

Is that the sequel to Fahrenheit 451? All snark aside, I won't read Hilary's book, just like I didn't read Obama's books. If I needed 300 pages to tell me nothing, I'd read half of Ulysses again and pretend that my negligible ancestry gives me a unique insight into the insane and verbose.

[shiny!]

Re: The Right to Be Forgotten

Is that the sequel to Fahrenheit 451? All snark aside, I won't read Hilary's book, just like I didn't read Obama's books. If I needed 300 pages to tell me nothing, I'd read half of Ulysses again and pretend that my negligible ancestry gives me a unique insight into the insane and verbose.

I'm impressed that you even got halfway through Ulysses.

"Classic": a book which people praise and don't read." -Mark Twain

[Woodsman]

Re: The Right to Be Forgotten

Speaking of censorship, Costco took D'Souzas "America" from it's books shelves, citing "poor sales". (Costco has just reversed this decision)

http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/costco-re...-from-shelves/

http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/costco-de...-dsouzas-book/

This promptly sent the book to NUMBER 1 on Amazon's best seller list (it was already in top 10 before).

http://www.amazon.com/America-Imagin...ywords=america

Meanwhile Hillary's "Hard Choices", which is still on Costco's shelves is at number 88 on the list.Ironically "Farenheit 455" has come out of nowhere to number 39

Poor Dinesh, hoisted on his own peter. The moral exemplar of the right wing. "Do as I say, not as I do; this is the first commandment" for conservative religious and political entrepreneurs like Dinesh.


He scolds America for its "sexual immorality" and then is caught philandering with a married woman (and at a Baptist revival in Spartanburg, S.C., no less). He's happy to rake in millions selling dull and repetitive books and films to witless conservatives, decrying the pity of our moral collapse while actively engaging in criminal conspiracies that would land any of us in prison for a decade. He blames the "cultural left" for everything from rickets to 9/11 and even his conservative colleagues call him out for engaging in character assassination and peddling pseudo-intellectual claptrap.


I'm not at all surprised to hear his latest book is topping the charts. The right wing echo chamber has perfected their circle jerk marketing machine, and conservative folks take to this nonsense like a dog does to its vomit. Funny thing is all Dinesh ever really wanted was to bed a tall blue-eyed blonde. He landed long suffering Dixie, God bless her. I can't imagine how foolish that woman must have felt to be cast aside for sweet young Denise. Interesting how when Clinton used his power and authority to seduce young women on his staff, this was evidence of moral collapse. But when Dinesh does it, it's political persecution.


But that's how these fellows roll. I've been to CPAC, I've been backstage at the Heritage talks and the after hours hospitality suites. I was privy to the private conversations when everyone felt safe among friends. I can tell you that at least among the conservative luminaries I knew who came up in the 80s and 90s, Dinesh is a dime a dozen when it comes to hypocrisy and cynicism. They laugh at you while they lie to your face and take your money. It used to make me angry, but now I think all of them deserve each other.