Google News Is Now Routing Explicit Spam Through University Domains Into James Charles's Feed

The James Charles Google News feed has a spam problem, and the spam has started borrowing academic credentials.

On September 11 and September 12, two explicit spam entries surfaced in the feed attributed, visually, to Cal Poly Pomona and Loughborough University respectively. The headlines are not printable in full here. One includes a claim of a "viral hot sex Video on Twitter." The other is structured around a similar pattern and opens with a character string that functions as a volume warning. Neither institution published these. The URLs route through Google's news aggregation layer, not through either school's web properties.

For the record: this is the second documented wave of explicit spam in this particular feed. The first appeared on August 28. That one was one entry. This week produced two, on consecutive days, each wearing a different university's name like a coat it found on the floor.

The mechanism here is a known SEO exploit, not some novel attack. Spammers submit URLs that pass Google News's ingestion checks long enough to get indexed, then the content does whatever it was going to do. The interesting part is not the spam itself. It's that a creator's official Google News presence has become porous enough that this is happening more than once, at an accelerating clip, and the entries are lasting long enough to be documented by third-party monitors.

James Charles's feed has spent the past several weeks accumulating obituaries, MMA recaps, a 2017 Casper meme article, and now two rounds of university-branded explicit spam. The feed is not curated by Charles or his team. It is an automated product. But it is also the first thing a journalist, a brand partner, or a curious stranger sees when they search his name in Google News. That is the part worth sitting with.

Google has not commented on the specific entries.

What happens next: Whether Google removes the indexed entries, whether the exploit recurs a third time, and whether any formal complaint or News Publisher Center action is filed by Charles's team remain unresolved as of September 12.