Update: this is now a story in The Register. No I have not stopped cackling with laughter.

There was a piece in 404 recently about the myriad of web sites, including government sites, which have been invaded by SEO AI slop. Those sites had been abandoned or forgotten about or had served their purpose, and now, surprise surprise, they’re linkbait soup.

I don’t think that most people realise how ephemeral many sites are, particularly for public sector or publicly-funded initiatives, because for many of them, the goal of the organisation is not to devise a good communications strategy. The goal is to get the marketing budget out of the door.

That’s it. That’s the goal.

So the organisation hires an agency to build them a site. Yep, build us a site. Any site. Just make us a site. And when I was one, that agency was me. The thing that made me lose heart about my own web design business, which focused on the third sector and charities, was dealing with clients like this: they just wanted to cut a cheque before 5 April, which is the last day of the UK fiscal year. That was all they wanted to do. They didn’t actually care what I’d use it to make. The site I was the most proud of, that I put the most work into creating, and the most heart too? The client never logged into it once. They refused all my offers to train them on how to use it. They never updated it. They did not use it. At all. Ever.

Again, where project/public funding is in the picture, that’s normal. 

What results from this culture of “get the money out the door” is abandoned sites for forgotten projects which live as legacy housekeeping for some junior staffer who has no institutional knowledge of why they existed. The next thing you know, those sites are full of spam slop, either because they are no longer being properly maintained or because the junior staffer let them in, via the spam emails that bombard any web site administrator.

And now they’re payloading AI slop along with the spam links. Happy days.

Anyway…

The reason I wanted to mention this was not to take you down the memory lane of my own cynicism. The reason I mention this is because I recently rediscovered a publicly funded campaign site relevant to my own work now, one which generated a lot of light and heat at its launch, and one which involved more money than I’ve ever had in my life.

And surprise surprise, it’s now spam rot of the absolute worst kind.

Canny observers of UK tech politics will remember – and cringe, as you remember it – a campaign which the Home Office rolled out in 2022, in partnership with a number of children’s charities, called “No Place to Hide.”

This campaign, true to Home Office form, was anti end-to-end encryption. Suffering from the bad case of Facebook Derangement Syndrome which characterised Tory internet regulation, it focused on Facebook/Meta without comprehending that what it demanded impacted everyone, not just Facebook. (Of which I have spoken more than I ever should have needed to.)

The reason you’re remembering this campaign is that even by late Tory standards, it was particularly unhinged.

One, because they threw £534,000 at Saatchi (dahling!) to make this campaign. Yes, five hundred and thirty four thousand of our late beloved queen’s heads.

And two, because the original plan for the campaign included this:

one the activities considered as part of the publicity offensive is a striking stunt — placing an adult and child (both actors) in a glass box, with the adult looking “knowingly” at the child as the glass fades to black.

Yes, that is what they paid Saatchi (dahling!) to come up with. A live, in person publicity stunt with a human child in a box.

Even the ICO, which is normally more useless than a supermarket brand bra, was all ‘seriously guys wtf’ and that is saying something.

Anyway.

I am getting to the point.

I recently pulled up ye old web site for my work.

OK, that bit still looks the same.

Ye olde home page

Scrolling down, this bit still looked the same too.

anon anon hey nonny nonny

And this bit looked the sa- oh hold on

*record scratch*

What is that at the bottom there?

is that –

Computer, enlarge:

Yep. That there is a mother clucking payday loan ad.

In the middle of a £534,000 web site from Saatchi (dahling!).

And it’s not just a payday loan ad; it’s spewing the language that leaves parents confused and scared and that is the kind of misinformation which results in, well, campaigns like these.

So whose problem is it that the site is now abandoned and pushing payday loans to vulnerable parents? It’s certainly not mine.

The problem is, to the Home Office and the charities which put their names and logos on it, it’s not their concern either.

Because the campaign budget was spent and the money got out the door and the KPIs were hit and so this campaign, to them, was a resounding success.

End of.

But here’s the thing which, “as a mother”, I am sure of:

in early 2022, when this campaign ran, the UK’s young people, whom this campaign was allegedly designed to protect, were just emerging out of nearly two years of having their mental health completely destroyed by lockdown.

You forget that for that entire generation, lockdown meant being required to sit in their bedrooms in their full school uniforms, in front of a spyware-riddled school-issued Chromebook which took webcam stills of them every thirty seconds to meet their school’s “safeguarding” obligations.

They had already been locked in a small box, with adults leering at them in their most private spaces, on technology over which they had no choice or control, for a very, very long time.

Having come out of that ordeal, which was also defined by no in-person human social contact with their peers for all that time, their mental health was absolutely shredded. They were then told that the waiting list for CAMHS was between 18 and 24 months long unless they actually attempted suicide, in which case it would shorten to between 3 and 6 months.

Because there was no money for more CAMHS.

But there was £534,000 for Saatchi.

Dahling.