Why Google Is Yanking Negative Coverage Of Powerful People From Its Search Results

The implementation of the European Union’s so-called “right to be forgotten” policy is already having a worrying impact on the media, with at least two outlets revealing on Wednesday that links to articles of theirs have been scrubbed from Google.

A European court ruled in May that Google must remove links to articles from its search engine if the subjects of the post asked it to. The court specified that links could be scrubbed if they were “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.”

When the ruling came down, some worried that it would place too much power in the hands of public figures who wished to have unflattering information—and, especially, press coverage—about themselves hidden.

On Wednesday, the Guardian and the BBC both disclosed that just such an occurrence seemed to have taken place with stories of theirs.

The BBC’s case was possibly the more troubling, since it concerned a former Wall Street titan. The broadcaster’s economics correspondent, Robert Peston, wrote a blog post highlighting the removal of a 2007 item he’d written about Stan O’Neal, the former head of Merrill Lynch who was hugely implicated in the subprime mortgage scandal.

O’Neal was the only person named in Peston’s blog post, leading to the obvious conclusion that the disgraced former tycoon had lobbied Google to have it removed.

The Guardian’s James Ball wrote that the newspaper had received a notification from Google that six of its articles had been taken down from the search giant’s European sites.

Three of the articles concerned Dougie McDonald, a soccer referee who was caught lying about one of his decisions in a game and subsequently resigned. The other three ran the gamut from a link to an index of blog articles to a piece about a lawyer in some legal trouble of his own.

Ball noted that all of the articles can still be found on Google’s American edition, but added that the removal of the articles amounted to “a huge, if indirect, challenge to press freedom.” He also questioned why Google had been given so much responsibility in the decision to scrub posts.

Courtesy:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/02/google-right-to-be-forgotten-media-guardian-bbc_n_5552972.html