News sites face ‘right to be forgotten’ questions

Newspapers used to go out with the weekly trash — often wrapped in binder twine and stacked in great towers.

It meant that most stories (save for the ones taped to the fridge door) had a shelf life of a week or two. Anyone interested in reviewing old coverage had to scroll diligently through reels of library microfilm.

The internet, of course, has changed all that: Newspaper content can now live online for decades, searchable anywhere by anyone through Google or Bing.

Once disposable, newspapers have a new permanence. As a result, they’re increasingly the target of removal requests from people who want embarrassing or damaging stories sent to the online trash bin

The Citizen is no exception. “We actually got a slew during Bluesfest, people asking that pictures be taken down because they didn’t like being shown at a concert,” said Keith Bonnell, deputy editor of the Ottawa Citizen and Ottawa Sun.

The newspaper has received requests from paroled criminals seeking to expunge old stories; from business owners who don’t want their names or buildings associated with a crime report; and from people who, for whatever reason, want their names to disappear.

The newspaper’s policy is to remove only that content with legal or ethical problems. Articles with factual errors are corrected but not removed.

“We acknowledge there may be particular, extenuating circumstances but it is the exception rather than the rule that we would remove published content,” Bonnell said.

In the European Union, where the right to be forgotten has been recognized since 2014, most removal orders have been directed at search engines, the internet’s primary gatekeepers. But newspapers have also come under pressure.

Last year, the Belgian Supreme Court ordered the newspaper Le Soir to remove a doctor’s name from a November 1994 news article that was available online. The article described the doctor’s conviction for drunk driving in a fatal car accident. The court ruled that the doctor’s right to privacy more than two decades after the accident trumped the newspaper’s right to freedom of expression.

Also last year, Italy’s high court upheld a ruling that ordered an online newspaper, Primadanoi, to take down an offending article that was just two years old. The court endorsed a lower court ruling that said online news should have an expiry date “just like milk, yoghurt or a pint of ice cream.” (The story in question concerned a restaurant owner’s criminal case.)

Jenn Topper, communications director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said removal requests should be left to a newspaper’s editorial discretion. “Regulatory bodies shouldn’t be dictating that truthful, accurate information be removed,” she said.

Carleton University’s Randy Boswell said newspapers should be quick to correct or augment the public record, but must be wary of subtracting from it.

“We need to be careful about efforts by individuals, corporations and groups to expunge evidence of offensive behaviour from a news story or photo,” said Boswell, an associate professor at the university’s School of Journalism and Communication.

“History, including yesterday’s journalism, may provide an incomplete or inconvenient picture of the past, but the best response is to acknowledge those limitations … not to excise uncomfortable or even erroneous information from public memory.”

Boswell, who specializes in solving historical mysteries through newspaper sleuthing, said it can be uncomfortable to read 19thcentury papers describe Indigenous people, Jews or women. But he said that information, even though offensive, is critical to understanding a time and place.

“The same principle applies to things that happened last month,” he argued. aduffy@postmedia.com