As Commanded by EU, News Stories Start Disappearing from Google Searches

The Google purge has begun in
Europe. After Europe’s top court ruled that people have the “right
to be forgotten” and have information that embarrasses them (with
no regard for factual accuracy) removed from searches, The
Guardian
reported that six of their stories are no longer easily
findable from people living in Europe:

The first six articles down the memory hole – there will likely
be many more as the rich and powerful look to scrub up their online
images, doubtless with the help of a new wave of “reputation
management” firms – are a strange bunch.

Three of the articles, dating from 2010, relate to a now-retired
Scottish Premier League referee, Dougie McDonald, who was found to
have lied about his reasons for granting a penalty in a Celtic v
Dundee United match, the backlash to which prompted his
resignation.

I find that to be such a hilariously appropriately European
thing to be the first censored searches. The only thing that would
have been more European would have been Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi
trying to make Google forget him:

The other disappeared articles – the Guardian isn’t given any
reason for the deletions – are a 2011 piece on
French office workers making post-it art, a 2002 piece about a
solicitor
facing a fraud trial standing for a seat on the Law Society’s
ruling body and an index
of an entire week of pieces by Guardian media commentator Roy
Greenslade.

That last link includes an image of Berlusconi with a creepy
grin on his face, so maybe I spoke too soon. BBC has
had a blog post about a former CEO of Merrill Lynch pushed off
searches. The media outlets are not told why they’re being rendered
unfindable from Google, nor is there an appeal process. These
stories can be found by going through other versions of Google
search pages not tied to countries (Google cleverly offers this
choice from the UK Google page), but it might not occur to users to
look for additional links that aren’t there due to government
censorship.

Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum wrote
about the awfulness of this ruling back in May. My suggestion to
media outlets incensed by this behavior: Repost these stories with
a new, slightly changed headline on a new page (and therefore a new
URL). Google will pick it back up and it will go right back into
the search engine.