The “right to be forgotten” takes a new and sinister turn
I warned about it at the time and have written extensively about it: inventing absurd and non-existent rights never produces good outcomes.
The so-called “right to be forgotten” is a legal aberration that supposedly enshrines the right to delete (only for EU citizens or for those who do not know how to use a VPN) information that speaks ill of a person (as long as they are not famous), and that authorizes people to figuratively walk around Europe removing pages from newspaper archives.
For many centuries, people who appeared in the news understood that, once published, they could only request a rectification if what had been written or said about them was false or erroneous. Often, these rectifications were useless anyway, because they were buried among the news of the day and what the collective imagination remembered was the original news, even if it was false or erroneous.
Since the advent of the Internet, which allows these corrections to be anchored to the original news so that they can be seen whenever they are read, the courts of justice of the European Union decided to force search engines not to index news that the individual concerned does not like. In the physical world this isn’t possible, but in the virtual world it is, so they decided o see what would happen. In other words, if you…
