Early last week, if you typed “BYU Honor Code Office” into Google, your search would have pulled up 783,000 links.
It would have shown you news coverage about students at Brigham Young University criticizing how the office enforces its code on campus and describing the reforms they seek. But the first result was a Q&A published by the private religious school, where it posed questions to the office director about its policies and he defended them.
That’s because BYU paid about $800 for a Google keyword ad to push its take to the top, "so that people looking for information about our Honor Code Office had a chance to see [the director’s] remarks,” said Joe Hadfield, a spokesman for the school, in an email.