Forget Me Knots And Memory Holes

Michael Hedges September 26, 2016 - Follow on Twitter

The digital dividend continues to chill the journalistic air. Online services give too much or too little, attract too many people but far less revenue. Search engines and aggregators are the new street corner kiosks. Libraries store newspapers for hundreds of years or until the paper disintegrates. Nobody goes there in the smartphone age. They go online where nothing is lost or forgotten.

When incredulity passed into reality with the Right To Be Forgotten inscribed permanently into European Union law in 2014, advocates for free speech and the journalism trade were deeply apprehensive. Under the Data Protection Directive, upheld by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), search engines, largely Google due to its global scale and the specific Google Spain case brought to the ECJ, have been required to sever search links to web pages deemed "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.” Online news publishers warned of the public’s right to know being tossed down Orwell’s memory hole, “whirled away on a current of warm air”.

A restive Google, other search engines following, complied grudgingly. Privacy rights, very touchy in Europe’s historical context, demand control over a nosy public empowered digitally. Google, reportedly, has removed from indexing about a half million website links from 1.6 million requests, according to the Columbia Journalism Review (July 26).

Individual governments have pushed extensions to the Right To Be Forgotten. The Rome (Italy) Supreme Court of Causation upheld in June a lower court ruling that requires online news publishers to effectively delete pages after a proscribed length of time, two or two and a half years, noted Guardian News and Media in-house lawyer Athalie Matthews in the Guardian (September 20). Online news portal PrimaDaNoi was fined and ordered to remove a 2008 news item about a stabbing in a restaurant because search results for the restaurant turned up the story, thus, it argued, tainting its reputation. (See more about press freedom here)

"The news story about a knife fight in a restaurant must be removed from the digital archive because despite being correct, telling the truth and not going beyond the limits of the law, produced a detriment to the applicants, that is, the subjects of the story,” said the Court. “The easy accessibility and searchability of the story, exceeding those of printed newspapers, given the widespread distribution of the local online news (portal), allowed from the date of publication until formal notice of Court sufficient time because the news disclosed would have satisfied the public interests underlying the publisher’s journalistic right.” The Rome Court borrowed extensively from the ECJ Google Spain decision. PrimaDaNoi indicated it will pursue an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

“The right to report information has an expiry date just like milk, yoghurt or a pint of ice cream,” fumed Italian media lawyer Guido Scorza in L’Espresso (July 1). “The feeling is that there is still a long way to go to reconcile the right to be forgotten with freedom of the press, and to better balance the interest of the individual and that of the community. Perhaps the time has come for each of us to learn to live with our own past, because otherwise, what awaits us is a future devoid of the collective memory that nurtured democracy along the centuries.”

Google confirmed earlier this year that it would be using geo-location to ascertain a search user is in the European Union to apply requested website index removals. French data protection agency CNIL set a €100,000 fine against Google for failing to remove links to web pages worldwide, “beyond the normal jurisdiction of French and European authorities,” reported Les Echos (September 21). Google, mounting a flotilla of lawyers, asked the French State Council to annul the fine.

See also in ftm Knowledge

Press/Media Freedom - Challenges and Concerns

Press and media freedom worldwide is facing challenges from many corners. As authoritarian leaders impose strict control over traditional and new media with impunity, media watchers have concerns for democracy. This ftm Knowledge file accounts the troubles of this difficult decade. 88 pages. PDF (December 2011)

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