Yes absolutely, the websites are kind of playing with keywords and titles.... however, Google is using face recognition to rank these articles...the choice of these articles at the top is not coincidence in my opinion.
Unless you're using an actual image to search for other images, I don't think google is using any sort of facial recognition. What makes you think otherwise? I could be wrong (not an SEO expert), but can't find anything about it.
There's a lot of outrage among Republicans regarding google and social media sites having a liberal bias. Some of it is justified, but, in my opinion, most of it, including google searches, is not. This is causing a lot of confirmation bias, which I think is the case in your example.
