Wikipedia swears to fight 'censorship' of 'right to be forgotten' ruling

Announcing its first transparency report, Wikipedia reveals that Google has received five requests to remove links to its pages

Alex Hern

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales has revealed new details about what he describes as the site’s “censorship” under the EU’s “right to be forgotten” laws.

Wales revealed that Google has been asked to remove five links to Wikipedia in the last week. Now the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit group which runs the collaboratively edited encyclopaedia, has posted the notices of removal from Google online.

Among the articles removed from search results are an image of a young man playing a guitar, a page about the former criminal Gerry Hutch, and a page about the Italian gangster Renato Vallanzasca.

Speaking at the launch of Wikimedia’s transparency report, Wales attacked people who would use the “right to be forgotten” ruling to remove links to Wikipedia.

“History is a human right and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another,” he said. “I’ve been in the public eye for quite some time. Some people say good things, some people say bad things … that’s history, and I would never use any kind of legal process like to try to suppress it.”

Wales, who founded Wikipedia in 2001, has been outspoken against the right to be forgotten, frequently describing it as “censorship” and “tyrannical”.

He argued that Google’s decision over what to index should be seen as “editorial judgement”, the same as a newspaper’s decision about what goes on its front page, and that the state interfering in that decision is censorious.

Google has always argued that it does not want to impose editorial judgment over its search results, and emphasises the “neutrality” of machine-determined results.

Geoff Brigham, Wikipedia’s general counsel, said that many more links may have been removed without Wikimedia’s knowledge.

“We only know about these removals because the involved search engine company chose to send notices to the Wikimedia Foundation,” he said. “Search engines have no legal obligation to send such notices. Indeed, their ability to continue to do so may be in jeopardy.

“Since search engines are not required to provide affected sites with notice, other search engines may have removed additional links from their results without our knowledge. This lack of transparent policies and procedures is only one of the many flaws in the European decision.”

Lila Tretikov, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, described the ruling as creating Orwellian “memory holes”. “Accurate search results are vanishing in Europe with no public explanation, no real proof, no judicial review, and no appeals process,” she said.

“We find this type of veiled censorship unacceptable. But we find the lack of disclosure unforgivable. This is not a tenable future. We cannot build the sum of all human knowledge without the world’s true source, based on pre-edited histories.”

While accepting that there should be remedies for people who were the subjects of inaccurate information published on the internet, such as libel laws or corrections, all three of the Wikimedia executives were adamant that accurate, if out-dated, information should stay online, and should continue to be linked to by search providers such as Google. They all also insisted that there was no historical information that they themselves were tempted to remove.
Zero requests granted

The revelations about Wikipedia pages being censored under the right to be forgotten were made at the launch of Wikimedia’s transparency report. The foundation has followed in the steps of firms such as Twitter, Apple and Tumblr by publishing information about requests by state actors for user data and for content to be taken down.

Between July 2012 and June 2014, the period the first report covers, Wikimedia received 304 requests for content to be taken down or altered, but did not grant a single one.

One such request was to remove a “selfie” taken by a monkey, on the grounds that it infringed the copyright of the human photographer who posted the pictures. Wikipedia declined, arguing that the photographer did not, in fact, own the copyright.

Another request came from a Tasmanian aboriginal language centre, demanding the removal of the English-language article on “palawa mani”, arguing it owned copyright over the entire language. Wikimedia says that “copyright law simply cannot be used to stop people from using an entire language, or to prevent general discussion about the language.

Wikimedia was also asked to give up personal information 56 times during the period, and complied with the request 14% of the time.

The foundation has also not been asked to give up data under laws such as the US’s National Security Letters, which gag the recipients from revealing the request. This disclosure is a form of “warrant canary”: if Wikimedia stops saying it, it can be assumed to have received its first letter, Wales explained.