"Right To Censor" Watch

Well, it’s looking like the judgement that gives people the “right to be forgotten” is rapidly becoming the “right to censor”. In the last 24 hours I’ve seen these:

A blog post from Robert Peston has been “forgotten”:

Now in my blog, only one individual is named. He is Stan O’Neal, the former boss of the investment bank Merrill Lynch.

My column describes how O’Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.

Is the data in it “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”?

The ref calls for silence

A whole chunk of Guardianstories have been effectively removed from Google’s index, for the purposes of direct searching:

The first six articles down the memory hole – there will likely be many more as the rich and powerful look to scrub up their online images, doubtless with the help of a new wave of “reputation management” firms – are a strange bunch.

Three of the articles, dating from 2010, relate to a now-retired Scottish Premier League referee, Dougie McDonald, who was found to have lied about his reasons for granting a penalty in a Celtic v Dundee United match, the backlash to which prompted his resignation.

The stories are still live on The Guardian site – they just can’t be easily found through the obvious Google searches.

Anyone seen any others yet?

Image by Tim Samoff, and used under a Creative Commons licence