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Chronicles

The story behind the story

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Thanks To “Right To Be Forgotten,” Google Now Censors The Press In The EU

The EU's Right To Be Forgotten removals have been happening for about a week on Google, and now news publications are discovering the fallout.  For some searches, you can't find their news stories relating to certain people.

Marketing Land Danny Sullivan

Context & Ripple Effects

The mechanics were mapped early: a May 2014 explainer separated the myths from the realities of how the EU's new right-to-be-forgotten rule would actually operate inside Google, and reporting on June 9 already spotted tell-tale signs of removals reshaping European result pages. What was then an abstract compliance question has turned concrete within a week of enforcement.

First-order effects

  • News organizations are the immediate casualties: Guardian articles covering named individuals have been confirmed hidden from Google results shown to EU users, meaning European readers searching those names simply cannot find the journalism.
  • Publishers lose referral visibility on specific person-name queries overnight, with no advance notice of which stories have been delisted.

Second-order effects

  • Rivals and other newsrooms must now audit their own archives against removal requests and decide whether to contest delistings through Google's review process or accept the lost reach.
  • The BBC, Businessweek, Business Insider and others picking up the story signals the fallout is being treated as a press-freedom issue, not a search-quality quirk, raising the reputational stakes for how Google processes each request.

Third-order effects

  • If delisting at this scale holds, search engines become de facto arbiters of which journalism Europeans can find, institutionalizing a structural gap between what readers inside and outside the EU see for the same query.
  • That gap pressures regulators and platforms alike to define who reviews removal decisions — a private company's judgment call standing in for due process on press visibility.

The trend: Deletion-by-request regimes are turning search intermediaries into gatekeepers of press visibility, with publishers discovering their archives one hidden result at a time.

Related: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google · The Myths & Realities Of How Of The EU's New “Right To Be Forgotten” In Google Works · Publisher controls for AI search · Google · EU

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