2014 will be a new era of erasing criminals from history. A public mural in Melbourne will be altered to remove Rolf Harris’ image. Yep – just wipe his memory and all that art and music off the face of the earth. Shouldn’t he be left there to remind us that humanity is terribly flawed? But a much more sinister removal plan is in process. Criminal histories could be erased through Google’s “right to be forgotten” ruling – resulting in negative reports on the rich, famous and the criminal (elite) being removed and forgotten.
The Guardian newspaper and the BBC have said they have been notified by Google that links to some of their articles were removed from search results in Europe. There have been 250,000 requests so far and one BBC article that described how former Merrill Lynch Chief Executive Officer E. Stanley O’Neal was ousted after the investment bank racked up billions of dollars in losses was apparently removed. “It is the equivalent of going into libraries and burning books you don’t like,” Daily Mail Online publisher Martin Clarke said. And, “The ruling has created a stopwatch on free expression — our journalism can be found only until someone asks for it to be hidden,” author James Ball wrote on the Guardian’s website. (article). I can imagine all the evidence about 9/11 being systematically scrubbed from history.
And this is what is on Google’s site under ‘Removal Policies’: “We want to organize the world’s information, but some content on the web is sensitive or not appropriate for everyone to see”. (As a reminder: In Australia Google paid $781,461 in taxes in 2011, and though in 2013 Google Australia’s reported revenue was $357.7 million, it paid only $7.1 million in taxes).
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. From George Orwell’s 1984.