My fight with Google’s algorithm (and its employees) to protect my identity
You may be surprised how difficult it is to request that your own Google knowledge panel be made accurate and up to date.
I’m a mid-career public sector professional and PhD student. At least that’s how I would describe myself. In fact, it’s how a lot of different news stories and websites describe me. For example, and quite ironically, this news story from last year where I was contacted by a reporter for my “expertise in conspiracy theories, disinformation and misinformation”. It’s ironic because I’ve made several requests to Google to remove misinformation about me on my Google Knowledge Panel and how it inaccurately describes me, all of which have been rejected.
Repeatedly hearing back from the Google support team that the changes I’ve requested to how I am described by their search engine “cannot be supported” with the links and personal information I’ve provided about myself is about as Kafka-esque an experience as I’ve ever had. I feel like I’m slowly becoming another cautionary tale about how our own warped digital identities can float in front of us on the screen, like an apparition we can’t grasp, a self we have lost control over, in the mirror world which algorithms have conjured for us online.
I’ve found this analogy of the digital realm serving as a mirror world in which a doppleganger of ourselves might emerge, which comes by way of author and UBC associate professor Naomi Klein, both useful and terrifying. Reading Klein’s most recent book Doppleganger A Trip Into the Mirror World, was what finally motivated me to reach out to the Google support team to ask that they change the outdated reflection of me that comes up when you search my name on their engine. Though Klein herself, later in the book, describes how she has in fact released herself of the anxieties of her befuddled identity in the mirror world and her ego in the real world. Perhaps one day I will have the courage to follow suit, but as someone trying to develop a professional and academic identity at the crossroads of planning, public health, and the Infodemic, I felt I needed to try and address what I thought was a small but manageable misrepresentation of myself online that had irked me for some time.
Klein’s book is a wakeup call about the unraveling of reality, the personal and collective disorientation and disconnection many of us are experiencing today from disinformation and misinformation, the de-humanizing and de-peopling of each other through conspiracist rhetoric that essentializes identities and then recasts them in the scripts of dark fantasies as we “perform, partition, and project” in this house of mirrors we’ve become lost in. A house of mirrors which distracts us from the direct connections we might make with others who deep down may share the same fears, anxieties, guilts and hopes we hold but who have found an outlet and feelings of power and agency in the affective communities of online rage and paranoia which speak to the truth of the ways they feel, by providing falsehoods about the sources of injustices behind these feelings.
As her book details, and as a growing body of other literature warns, our immersion in this reality warping content has helped pave the way for today’s populist ‘post-truth’ authoritarian politics - a grotesque new iteration of fascism bubbling into form around the world. One in which new age healing and alternative wellness culture bleeds into sovereign citizens and pseudo science which bleeds into anti-semitic conspiracy theories about globalists and other elites. One which smashes its way into legislative buildings and lays seige to state capitols in carnivals of chaos.
It seems any attempt at serving the collective good and not just the individual desire can quickly be reframed as a tyrannical affront to human rights and freedoms today. From climate action, to public health, to the safe walkable neighbourhoods of the ‘15-Minute City’, no form of public policy seeking broad public benefits appears out of scope from the libertarian conspiracist reactionaries. Complaining about a how a knowledge panel inaccurately describes me seems quaint and petty by comparison, but it’s part of this battle for reality and the struggle against this dystopian political epoch we now find ourselves in. One in which our relationships with each other and with the institutions of government, symbolic concepts like freedom and democracy, are mediatized by platforms like Facebook, X, and Google. Where Alex Jones’ idea of freedom spreads a lot faster than say, John Dewey’s. Where Naomi Wolf’s views on vaccine science will spread a lot faster than anything any academic researcher anywhere has published in the past few years. Thanks to algorithms, our new arbiters of reality.
So, what is a knowledge panel? (Sorry, back to the boring stuff for just a sec). Well when you do a Google search for someone in the top right corner of the first page of search results (go ahead, try it on yourself) you may find a picture and a few items of information that Google’s algorithm decides summarize your identity. Mine looks like this
The problem starts with the question of who created my (or your) knowledge panel. In my case it wasn’t me. So I reached out to Google support to ask how I might retake ownership of my digital identity, at least one small but important slice of it, by having editing privileges on my own panel. They told me I would have to find out who started it or make a request through Google to be given permission to request changes. So I started asking around, beginning with the Green Party of Canada, whom I have not been a member of since 2019, but am still nonetheless listed as a politician with.
It’s true that in 2015 I was a candidate in Canada’s federal election representing the Green Party in the riding of Vancouver East, and yes, as the knowledge panel accurately notes, I was therefore a politician. It was the one and only time in my life I could be accurately described as such. I have not ran for public office since, and in fact, my career as a public sector planner and public health professional has required me to be non-partisan an apolitical as I strive to serve the public interest no matter who is elected by the citizens of my city, province, and country. This doesn’t mean I can’t make the occasional critical comment about government, I do, and this doesn’t mean I don’t belong to a party, I do, and it is no longer the Green Party. But it means when I show up to work I’m there as a public sector professional and not a partisan agent — and certainly, above all else, not as a politician.
Disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theories have persistently attacked the very notion of this form of public service I am committed to. Where lifelong public employees who have served under dozens of different elected governments of various parties and leanings have been relentlessly attacked today for being partisan hacks. This type of thinking is behind the vast and sweeping proposed purge of public sector leaders and rank and file workers outlined in Project 2025. As a story in the Berkeley Political Review Describes:
If successful, Project 2025 would facilitate the firing of approximately 50,000 federal workers. This mass exodus of a major workforce is merely a means to an end for the right-leaning Heritage Foundation and the other conservative corporations co-authoring the Project. They see the firing of career government officials as the most direct route to creating a federal bureaucracy filled with political loyalists
The persistent belief that career civil servants are secretly communist radicals, harkening back to the days of the McCarthy Witch Hunts, has somehow validated the equally absurd idea that a new workforce of unquestionably loyal sycophantic reactionary conservatives should replace them. Through Project 2025, whether it is Trump, Nikki Haley, or some other populist comet that comes crashing into the election from the outer reaches of America’s political universe, these 50,000 workers who are trying to keep food safe, nuclear plants from melting down, diseases from spreading, elections legitimate, and water uncontaminated, will be replaced by a corps of sycophantic yes men who are being screened today for their ideological purity and policy stances as a recent episode of the popular Conspirituality Podcast explores (Episode 187). A “Democratic Doomsday” as the Berkeley Review article describes it.
So, when I say I’m agitated as a public sector employee who is described by Google as a politician, my concerns go a little broader than just my own self interest. The politicization of the bureaucracy is just one of the many ways the institutions of pluralistic liberal democracies are under attack today. Project 2025 goes all in on this strategy.
Staff at the Green Party did not know who started my knowledge panel and nobody there had any information pertaining to it. So I got back in touch with Google and asked them to please, contact whoever started my panel on my behalf, and ask if I could have editing privileges on my own personal information or at least send them new information. A few days went by and I received an e-mail saying if I could verify my identity through a process of photos and links shared with Google that I could “claim” this knowledge panel. Great! I could make a claim on my own identity. Phew. This ‘claim’ has since empowered me to request Google staff make changes to how I am described, all of which have been rejected. Which made me feel even more disempowered.
It almost feels like some faceless distant actors in Paolo Alto, Toronto, or Bengaluru are conspiring together to prevent these changes. They consulted the oracle of the algorithm and the oracle told them I was wrong. I do not know who I am. This experience has inspired me to feel more empathy towards those who believe conspiracy theories about governments and big-tech. Even a change as seemingly simple as me notifying them that my wife of twenty years never took my last name when we married, something easily verifiable if you know who she is, was rejected by the Google support team. Nowhere on the internet is her name described as she appears in my Google Knowledge Panel and certainly not on our marriage certificate. How the Google algorithm conjured this name is a mystery. Magic. But it was right and I was wrong according to the Google Support Team.
I recognize that in some cases it is very much in the public interest to have trusted intermediaries communicate who we are, especially if we are public figures, based on the things we have said and done that are in the public record. Accepting that others will describe us in different ways based on what we do and say is one of the ways we are held accountable. It can be humbling, and helpful, to know that we are not perceived as that which we think we are. That our words and actions have not been received as we expected. Having trustworthy sources of information to curate those responses and present our public selves can be instrumental in reflecting on the disconnect between who we want to be, what we are trying to do and say, and why that might not be connecting with others in the way that we intended and hoped for. It can help us learn and change and grow. So I accept that there will be a range of these types of intermediaries in my life, and Google and its Knowledge Panels and algorithms will be one of them.
I’ll continue engaging with the Google Support Team about my online identity concerns. Even though they insist that their algorithm’s version of me is more real than the one I try to present to them. But let this stand as a warning to anyone thinking about a career involving a public profile, politics, academia, or otherwise. You may change, but that doesn’t guarantee your digital reflection in the mirror world will. Or conversely, your reflection in the mirror world may quickly warp into a grotesque doppleganger before your eyes, as Naomi Klein experienced. So take attempts early on to protect your identity online and prevent misinformation from taking hold as best you can. Lest you find yourself like me, sitting in your home office nook, hearing Will Farell’s ‘Mugatu’ character from Zoolander in your head yelling “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” as you read yet another e-mail about how the most recent list of links to websites and news stories describing how you are no longer what you were in 2015 are insufficient to convince a tech support worker thousands of miles away to make changes to your Google knowledge panel.