Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales on Censorship of Internet Search Results: 'History Is a Human Right'

As Scott Shackford
noted on Monday, enforcement of “the right to be forgotten”
continues apace in the European Union. The Guardian

reports that as of July 18, Google had received 91,000
requests that it remove links to embarrassing or inconvenient
content from its search results. Those requests become legally
enforceable demands when a country’s privacy protection agency
sides with a complainant, based on a subjective, amorphous standard
established
by the European Court of Justice last May. So far Google has
granted most requests (53 percent) upon receiving them, refused
about a third, and asked for additional information about the rest.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who has emerged as a prominent
and passionate critic of this censorship,
condemned it again today as he released Wikimedia’s first
annual transparency report:

History is a human right, and one of the worst things that a
person can do is attempt to use force to silence another….I’ve
been in the public eye for quite some time. Some people say good
things; some people say bad things…That’s history, and I would
never use any kind of legal process to try to suppress it.

Wales provided
additional information about 60 or so Wikipedia pages that
Google has agreed not to include in its E.U. search results. Here
are four of them, which are related to four requests:

http://ift.tt/1svb85v
(photo of a guitarist)

http://ift.tt/1zTwqx0
(article about “an Irish criminal, said to have been one of
Ireland’s most successful bank robbers”)

http://ift.tt/1zTwrkw
(article about “a criminal group active in the 70’s in robberies,
kidnappings, drug trafficking and weapons in the northern area
of Milan”)

http://ift.tt/1zTwrky
(article about “a notorious Italian mobster from Milan who was a
powerful figure in the Milanese underworld during the 1970s”)

I found English-language versions of the latter two items, which
is how I know what they’re about. The rest of the pages, all
related to one request, seem limited to the Dutch version of
Wikipedia. My Dutch is not so good, so I’m not sure what was
offensive about those pages, but they seem to have something to do
with
Guido den Broeder, whoever that might be.

All of these pages can still be viewed directly at the various
Wikipedia sites, or via non-E.U. versions of Google, so this memory
hole is not very deep. But eliminating the E.U.-directed links
certainly makes the information less accessible, which is the whole
idea. The government-ordered expurgation of search engine results
is an especially insidious and cowardly form of censorship,
stopping short of erasing information completely yet having much
the same impact as far as most Internet users are concerned.

Since search engines are not obligated to disclose censorship
requests to affected individuals or organizations, the full impact
of this policy may never be recognized. “We find this type of
veiled censorship unacceptable,” said Lila Tretikov, executive
director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “But we find the lack of
disclosure unforgivable. This is not a tenable future. We cannot
build the sum of all human knowledge without the world’s true
source, based on pre-edited histories.”