Pranksters rename New Zealand schools on Google maps

Some schools across New Zealand have had their names changed on Google Maps - in what appears to be a prank by internet users occurring around the world.

Nelson College for Girls has been renamed Yoza highschool, while Rathkeale College in Masterton has been called the Huak Tuah College of rizzcraft and sigmatry on Google.

In the Bay of Plenty, a video on TikTok shows Whakatane High School had previously been renamed as Whakamax High School, the wop wops High School, Yoza learning center (sic), Wawa High School and Hawk Tuah High School.

News coverage from around the world shows the same thing occurring within the last month in parts of America, Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

It is not the first time schools have been targeted on Google.

Back in 2019, the BBC reported that Hornsea School and Language College in East Yorkshire had been labelled Hornsea Prison & Hell on Earth in what was understood to be a joke by a pupil.

The school said at the time it knew who was responsible for the prank and recommended other schools "take ownership of their Google map icon to prevent any copy-cat behaviours".

Any internet user is able to suggest an edit of a place on Google Maps.

Technology commentator Peter Griffin said user-generated content was valuable to many sites like Google, but with it came the responsibility of managing that content.

Given the sheer volume of user-generated content, platforms used artificial intelligence and automated systems to detect bots in a bid to deal with spam and fake content, but it was harder to detect if edits were being suggested by people with legitimate accounts.

"It's probably just reasonably good-natured pranks by kids, but because they are actual Google users who have a track record using Google services it is hard to identify if they are legitimate users or spam accounts set up to cause mayhem."

He said Google and other large web companies usually only addressed such issues after receiving complaints.

"It is not an ideal situation and it just shows the limitations when you are dealing with millions of people on a platform.

"Anyone who has dealt with meta or Google to try and get something changed knows you cannot get hold of a person to talk to so it is just another example of how they want to build all this value from the crowd, from all of us, but when it comes to cleaning up misinformation or potential harm to people they are a lot less proactive."

Griffin said other platforms that suffered from poor content moderation, like Tumblr and Myspace, had become unusable due to spam, inappropriate and offensive content and inaccurate information.

"That's the thing that Google really wants to avoid and it's worked very hard with its automated systems to make sure it doesn't happen so they will put the effort in if this is going to damage their business in any way but anything that doesn't, they are quite happy to take a best efforts approach to it."

According to Google Maps policy, its user-generated content is designed to help ensure users have a positive experience, and keep the web service "fair and honest".

"While most of the millions of contributions we receive each day are authentic and accurate, we sometimes receive policy-violating content," it said.

"We use a combination of people and machine-learning algorithms to detect such content and to help prevent others from finding it."

It says users that come across misleading or fraudulent activity on Google Maps, related to publicly available factual information, can edit it.

Google has since corrected the school names that had been changed by internet users.

A spokesperson for Google said it had removed edits that violated the Google Maps user generated content policy - and taken steps to prevent further abuse.

The affected schools have been approached for comment.