In philosophy, the accent is on coming up with a right question. The underlying principle is that there is an answer to every right question. At some level, questioning is cerebral. However, providing answers is the task of sloggers. They have to delve deep into available literature, triangulate multiple strands to eliminate internal contradictions, and provide a clue that is consistent with both the legal and ethical frameworks. One of the frequent requests we receive is for a takedown of a particular story from our digital archive. These readers invoke the right to be forgotten and often cite the European Court of Justice’s 2014 judgment that directed the search engine, Google, to remove thousands of web links. The primacy of privacy supersedes freedom of expression and the accuracy of historical record in this judgment.
Why does this newspaper not encourage takedown requests? Does the non-existence of a particular material online erase it from all other forms of archiving? What about the existence of the physical newspaper, with the content that some readers want to take down, that exists not only in the newspaper’s office but also across various public libraries? Is the onus of monitoring and restricting a specific web link the job of a search engine? If a particular string is blocked by an algorithm, what prevents the interested parties from creating parallel strings to keep the expunged content alive online? Is it not important to remember the observation of the founders of Google: “The web is a vast collection of completely uncontrolled heterogeneous collections”?
For a transformative change
A scholar I rely on when dealing with the vexatious questions that arise from the contested interface between digital technologies and journalism is George Brock, a well-known journalist who worked for the Observer and The Times . Mr. Brock is now the head of the Graduate School of Journalism at City University, London and he served as president of the World Editors Forum. His 2013 book, Out of Print , argued that journalism can flourish in a new digital world if it is willing to adopt a transformative change while retaining its four core tasks: verification, sense-making, eye-witness and investigation.
Mr. Brock in his last book, The Right to be Forgotten (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford) looked at the rules that govern the preservation of information of public value, its contours and boundaries, and did not restrict himself to only what is in public interest now but what might be of interest in the future. He explains the power data harvesters have to alter the normal effects of the passage of time in the present context where information never fades into the past but often returns to the present with a keystroke. He wryly cites Lucas D. Introna and Helen Nissenbaum: “In twenty first century life, to exist is to be indexed by a search engine.” He concedes that there are problems that flow from this instant retrieval system where the information has a perpetual existence. For him, the issue goes beyond immediate concerns such as “censorship” or “deleting history on any scale”. He is rightly worried about ratchet moves that can extend the law’s grasp to shrink free expression. The carelessness of tech giants, with the unintended consequences of data protection, he argues, may have been the moral force behind legal restraint. But, he asserts, that should not lead to a situation that falls much short of the basic legal tenet of “specific and proportionate remedies for identifiable wrongs”.
Mr. Brock looks at a range of court cases, requests for delisting, the response of the search engines and the new growing industry of attorneys who claim that their efforts have led “to the successful removal of links that include information relating to past/spent convictions, disciplinary sanctions, offensive blog articles, news reports, private/intimate images, work place investigations and employment disputes”. He explains that the Google Spain case was not about defamation, which remains an expensive area of law; that it was not about inaccurate information as there was no dispute as to the newspaper’s original announcement; that it was not about wrongful release of private information as the announcement was meant to be public; and that it was not about information doing harm. It was about the petitioner’s claim that he had been embarrassed, which the court made it clear was not a requirement to de-index, yet which gave a verdict that may put free speech and journalism on a slippery slope.
