James Charles's Google News Feed Has Been Running a Parallel Obituary Section for Months

On October 17, 2026, the Google News feed indexed under beauty creator James Charles added its latest entry: the obituary of James Charles McLaughlin III of Brookfield, Connecticut, published by Thurston Rowe Funeral Home via Legacy.com. McLaughlin is not the creator. The creator is alive and, as of mid-October, was running a pop-up event in New York City.

What we know

The feed has a pattern. The McLaughlin obituary is at minimum the tenth unrelated obituary surfaced in the James Charles Google News feed since early September 2026. The documented list includes James Charles Roselius (Kinnelon, NJ, September 16), James Charles Yeary (Swanton, OH, September 26), James Charles Gurley Sr. (surfaced September 27 after a roughly twelve-week delay), James Charles Benedict (surfaced September 3), James Charles "Jim" Restelli (September 27), and two separate entries for a James Charles Stein of Warren, Ohio (September 25). McLaughlin is the most recent confirmed addition.

The feed is also absorbing non-obituary noise. For the record, the same feed has indexed explicit spam attributed to Cal Poly Pomona, Loughborough University, a Quebec provincial health authority domain, and a Czech government investment agency domain, all within the same September-October window. Two Sussex jewellery fraud conviction articles landed on October 15.

The mechanism is Google News, not the creator. These entries appear because Google's algorithm associates any article containing the phrase "James Charles" with the creator's news feed. Legacy.com obituaries use full legal names. The result is automatic and not the result of any action by the creator or his team.

What we don't know

Whether Google has been notified. No public statement from Google or from James Charles's team has addressed the obituary or spam accumulation in the feed.

How many entries there are in total. The documented cases represent what has surfaced through monitored sources. The actual volume may be higher.

When it started. The earliest confirmed obituary in this sequence is the Benedict entry, surfaced September 3. Whether the pattern predates that date is undocumented.

What happens next

Open questions include whether James Charles's team or Google will issue any comment on the feed's composition, whether the rate of obituary indexing will continue or slow, and whether any further spam entries will be attributed to institutional domains.