Erasing the News: Should some stories be forgotten? By Terry Carter – this is an extensive and well researched article. I have snipped a small portion to invite you to read it in its entirety online. Note – This article originally appeared in the January 2017 issue of the ABA Journal with this headline: “Erasing the News: The media and lawyers wrestle with the question: Should some stories be forgotten?”

“…Anecdotal evidence indicates that requests to unpublish have picked up in the United States since the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2014 created the so-called right to be forgotten. It is law for citizens in the 28-member countries that comprise the European Union….As news organizations and Google began to wrestle with demands to make information disappear, new forces came into play, including reputation management companies and the use of search engine optimization to change results. Businesses, such as ReputationDefender, charge thousands of dollars to push negative results downward in Google searches by seeding the web with positive links that rise to the top.”