The Sick Internet Joke About 9/11: ✈ ▌▌
An airplane flies into two vertical objects: For many ordinary New Yorkers, it's a horrible, still-living memory. For Internet commenters, it's absolutely hilarious.
A user on eBaum's World, a site which posts pictures and invites often profane discussion, suggested his peers search on a string of icons — "✈ ▌▌" — and thereby launch it onto Google Trends, the search engine's tracker for swiftly rising Internet phenomena.
The trick worked; Google's algorithm declared the glyph's rise "volcanic." And despite a surge of protests about its tastelessness, the Googlers have yet to censor the term, as they've been known to do with other offensive searches which show up on Google Trends, like a swastika symbol which showed up last summer.
Officially, Google says it has robots which take care of this: "The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material." In reality? The 9/11 hack shows how easy it is to fool Google.