[Guest19023892]

During the Pixel 6 event last month I searched on YouTube for the live stream that would be starting in a few minutes and clicked the first result. The result had a Pixel 6 thumbnail, the live icon, Google in the channel name, the Google logo as the avatar, and around 30k viewers. I was a bit surprised someone was already talking on the stage and thought I tuned in late.

Well, after watching for 5 or 10 minutes, they kept talking about Pixel 5s, and then I realized it was a fake account streaming the event from the previous year.

I went back to YouTube search and tried a variety of queries for fun, such as "pixel 6 event", "pixel live", "pixel 6 stream", "pixel phone", and they all featured this fake stream as the first result. It continued to grow and was over 50k viewers. Further down the list was another stream with the same thumbnail, same avatar, and a similar channel name, and that happened to be the real one. It had around 120k viewers, so not much better than the fake channel.

After about 30 minutes or half way through the event, the fake stream was finally removed from the results.