Google removed ~200 links of a German princess' drunken rampage from its search results suggesting the rich and powerful have a superior “right to be forgotten”
Jordan Wildon / VICE : Tweets: @wongmjane , @vice , @iethics , @pmatzko , and @jessemangelo Tweets: Jane Manchun Wong / @wongmjane : Talking about Streisand Effect.. https://twitter.com/... @vice : A literal princess is making Google ‘forget’ her drunken rant about killing Muslims. https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... @iethics : Google's explanation of this appears to be pretty straightforward: compliance with a court's preliminary injunction deeming the “identifying content” “illegitimate”: https://www.vice.com/... #ethics #law #internet #righttobeforgotten #RtBF Paul Matzko / @pmatzko : Libertarians and free speech activists warned that the EU's “right to be forgotten” would quickly devolve into a way for the wealthy and well-connected to limit public scrutiny. This may be a particularly outrageous example but it's routine these days. https://www.vice.com/... Jesse Angelo / @jessemangelo : Fascinating and important story - is EU “right to be forgotten” becoming a tool for those with means to avoid embarrassment rather than an equalizer. A Princess Is Making Google Forget Her Drunken Rant About Killing Muslims https://www.vice.com/... via @vice
Context & Ripple Effects
This case is the latest turn in a fight Google has been running since it started publishing the mechanics of its right-to-be-forgotten decision-making in 2015, when it also disclosed that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter top the list of delisted domains. What began as an individual-request process has since been litigated up the chain: Google fought France's data authority to the country's highest court, and the question of whether EU removals must apply globally went to the EU's top court.
What changed here is the mechanism: rather than a privacy-balancing request, a court's preliminary injunction deemed the princess's "identifying content" illegitimate, and Google complied by removing roughly 200 links. Commentators including Paul Matzko read the outcome as the right to be forgotten functioning as a tool the wealthy can deploy against public scrutiny — and Jane Manchun Wong's Streisand-effect quip captures the obvious risk that the removal itself amplifies the story.
First-order effects
- Google has delisted about 200 links about the German princess across its search results after a court preliminary injunction, meaning the identifying content is suppressed for searchers regardless of the usual public-interest balancing test.
- The princess's legal team gets what it wanted — the rant is harder to find via search — but the VICE reporting and the surrounding tweets now attach her name to the censorship story itself.
Second-order effects
- Given Google's own transparency data showing social platforms are the most-targeted domains for delisting requests, injunction-backed removals like this one give well-resourced individuals a faster, more coercive path than the standard request queue — and a template other litigants can copy.
- The Streisand dynamic cuts against Google's compliance posture: every removal that draws press coverage hands critics of the EU regime a concrete example of powerful figures scrubbing unflattering content.
Third-order effects
- If courts increasingly route right-to-be-forgotten disputes through preliminary injunctions rather than Google's review process, delisting power shifts from a platform's case-by-case balancing toward whoever can afford the litigation — a structural tilt the EU's pending global-delisting ruling at the top court will either reinforce or constrain.
- For Google, each high-profile compliance case raises the stakes of its gatekeeper role: it is simultaneously enforcing court orders, publishing transparency data, and absorbing the reputational cost of who gets forgotten.
The trend: The EU's right to be forgotten is evolving from a privacy request process into a litigation instrument, with courts — not Google's review queues — increasingly deciding what search results survive.