Thomas Goolnik Gets Google To Forget Our Story About Him Getting Google To Forget Stories About Thomas Goolnik

Free Speech

from the sorry-thomas dept

You’ll recall, of course, that prior to the GDPR, there was a big case against Google in the EU that created, out of thin air, a “right to be forgotten” (perhaps, more accurately, “a right to be delinked”) saying that for certain classes of information that showed up in Google’s search index, it should be treated as personal data that had to be delinked from that user’s name as no longer relevant. This never made any sense at all. A search result is not like out-of-date customer database info, yet that’s how the Court of Justice in the EU treated it. Unfortunately, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect earlier this year, the “right to be forgotten” was even more officially coded into law. We’ve noted recently, there have been a few attempts to use the GDPR to delete public information on American sites, and now we at Techdirt have been hit with what appears to be just such an attempt.

This particular attempt goes back to some previous attempts under the pre-GDPR “right to be forgotten” setup. We need to dig into the history a bit to understand the details. You see, soon after the floodgates opened on delinking names from Google, we wrote about an article in the NY Times discussing how five of its articles had been delinked via RTBF claims. It was not 100% clear who had made the requests, but we did highlight some of the names and stories, including one where we called the removal “questionable.” It involved a NY Times article from 2002 about a legal action by the FTC which went after a group of companies allegedly run by a guy named Thomas Goolnik. The companies — TLD Network, Quantum Management and TBS Industries — were accused of “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” by selling domains that did not exist at the time (specifically, they were trying to sell domains using top level domains that did not exist, including .sex, .bet, .brit, and .scot.)

The FTC eventually settled with Goolnik and the companies with some significant concessions:

The settlement bars the defendants from making misrepresentations about the usability of domain names or about the nature of any product or service they sell over the Internet. The settlement also bars the defendants from failing to clearly and conspicuously disclose material limitations or conditions on the usability or functionality of domain names. The settlement bars the defendants from selling customer lists. In addition, the defendants will turn over as much as $300,000 being held in merchant accounts for consumer redress. Redress payments will be available to consumers in the UK and other countries, as well as the United States. The settlement also contains record-keeping requirements to allow the FTC to monitor compliance with the court’s order.

This seems like information that is very much in the public interest. Someone, however, doesn’t think so. There are many indications that that “someone” is Thomas Goolnik. Ten months after our article talking about the NY Times article about Google delinking their story about Thomas Goolnik’s legal troubles with the FTC, we received a notification from Google that our article about the NY Times article had also been delinked under a RTBF request. So we wrote about that. A week later, we received a notice that this new article had also been delinked via a RTBF request.

In that post, in September of 2015, we were extremely clear to anyone from Google looking over that post that it was not about Goolnik’s earlier activities (which we still believed were in the public’s interest), but specifically about Thomas Goolnik’s current actions — specifically an action to abuse the RTBF process to try to hide the fact that he was credibly accused by the FTC of unfair or deceptive practices, leading to a substantial settlement. Since Google had already memory holed two of our articles on the subject, we even included “a special note to the Google RTBF reviewer reading” that post:

We are purposely not mentioning the details of the original story that Thomas Goolnik would no longer like to be associated with. Even if you believe that information is no longer relevant, this article does not discuss that. Instead, it discusses newsworthy and relevant information about Thomas Goolnik today, which is that he’s filing a series of right to be forgotten requests to Google on any story that mentions his attempts to use the RTBF to delete his history. The original EU ruling clearly states that that when a search engine is evaluating a RTBF request, that it should see if the data is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.” This is not about irrelevant information from the past. This is about what appears to have happened this week or last.

Anyway, on Wednesday, three years later, we received… a new notification, that that third article had now been delinked under a RTBF request.

To: Webmaster of https://www.techdirt.com/,

Due to a request under data protection law in Europe, Google can no longer show one or more pages from your site in Google Search results. This only affects responses to some search queries for names or other personal identifiers that might appear on your pages. Only results on European versions of Google are affected. No action is required from you.

Who could possibly want to make such a request? There would be substantial evidence that it is Thomas Goolnik. While Google does not name who specifically made the requests, the fact that every post we’ve ever had mentioning Thomas Goolnik (minus this one… so far) ends up getting delinked in Google provides pretty strong clues that Thomas Goolnik is continuing to use highly questionable RTBF claims to try to delete news coverage of his history and his recent actions.

Once again, if you are a Google RTBF reviewer there is no reason under either the original RTBF rules or the GDPR right to erasure rules that this article should be delinked from anyone’s name, but especially Thomas Goolnik’s. It is about public, relevant, newsworthy information concerning Thomas Goolnik, including his ongoing attempts to use the right to be forgotten to erase a substantial legal settlement he had with the FTC concerning “unfair or deceptive practices” which makes its continued existence very much in the public interest.

And, if you’re Thomas Goolnik reading this: stop it.

Filed Under: europe, free speech, ftc, gdpr, hiding news, news, right to be forgotten, rtbf, thomas goolnik, thomas goolnik thomas goolnik, thomas goolnik thomas goolnik thomas goolnik
Companies: google

EU Commission Moving Forward With Legislation Demanding One Hour Removal Of 'Terrorist Content'

Free Speech

from the ask-and-ye-shall-receive-as-many-fines-as-ye-can-collect dept

Governments — which will process requests from citizens in statutorily-required time almost zero percent of the time — never think the private sector moves fast enough. The government says “Jump” and then immediately asks why the jumping wasn’t already in progress when it ordered the jumping to commence.

Content that isn’t even of the “I know it when I see it” variety isn’t being taken down quickly enough for the EU. Various members have implemented their own 24-hour policies for the removal of everything from “hate speech” to “extremist content” — both particularly difficult to classify immediately when context and newsworthiness must be considered.

The EU Commission is reeling in the leash it has attached to US social media companies. It pitched the idea back in March but now appears to following through with its threats. The latest move towards impossibility is detailed by The Financial Times.

Brussels plans to force companies including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to identify and delete online terrorist propaganda and extremist violence or face the threat of fines.

The European Commission has decided to abandon a voluntary approach to get big internet platforms to remove terror-related videos, posts and audio clips from their websites, in favour of tougher draft regulation due to be published next month.

Here’s the stipulation that will turn popular social media sites into EU-owned ATMs.

Although details of the regulation are still being drawn up inside the commission, a senior EU official said the draft legislation was likely to impose a limit of one hour for platforms to delete material flagged as terrorist content by police and law enforcement bodies.

Imagine imposing this sort of time limit on anything a government agency does. Imagine the outcry about the impossibility of serving citizens in a timely fashion. But nothing’s too short for the private sector, which can set about nuking content indiscriminately just in case, rather than write checks to the EU on an hourly basis.

The impetus is recent terrorist attacks, of course. Any amount of ridiculousness can be excused in the name of public safety and national security, even if the resulting mess has almost zero impact on either of those two concerns.

The incumbent social media sites already have algorithms and live moderation teams addressing questionable content. And it’s still not enough for insatiable government officials. Entrants into the market may as well not even bother. They cannot hope to stay alive, much less compete, if governments are going to hold them directly responsible for content posted by their users.

Then there’s the fact that burying stuff as soon as it shows up does little to aid investigations or the pursuit of terrorists. Ask anyone who’s witnessed the damage done to law enforcement efforts by SESTA/FOSTA — a law touted as a crushing blow to human trafficking. All it’s done is make traffickers harder to find by forcing them to utilize less visible platforms and communication methods. The same thing is happening here and every time “terrorist content” is nuked, it makes martyrs of villains and proves to acolytes and new recruits the West is out to get them.

The EU would be better off letting the voluntary measures already in place go to work. The press for one-hour turn time reeks of rent collection, not honest concerns about public safety.

Filed Under: censorship, content removals, europe, takedowns, terrorist content
Companies: facebook, twitter, youtube

Europe's Ongoing Attack On Free Speech, And Why It Should Concern Us All

Free Speech

from the this-is-not-helping dept

David Kaye, a law professor who has also been the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression (quite the title!) has penned a very interesting article for Foreign Affairs (possibly behind a paywall or registration wall) about how Europe’s recent attempts to regulate the internet are now a major threat to free speech. It talks about many issues we’ve written about, from the awful Right to be Forgotten cases to efforts to fine internet platforms if they don’t magically disappear hate speech. While telling internet platforms to “fix it’ may feel good, the reality is that it doesn’t work, creates more problems, and gives those platforms even more power as the de facto speech police (something we should all be worried about). As Kaye writes:

In September of this year, the commission doubled down on these principles, adopting a formal communication that urges ?online platforms to step up the fight against illegal content.? As with the right to be forgotten, the communication puts the companies themselves in the position of identifying, especially through the use of algorithmic automation, illegal content posted to their platforms. But, as Daphne Keller of Stanford?s Center for Internet and Society has argued, the idea that automation can solve illegal content problems without sweeping in vast amounts of legal content is fantasy. Machines typically fail to account for satire, critique, and other kinds of context that turn superficial claims of illegality into fully legitimate content. Automation thus involves a disproportionate takedown of legal content all to target a smaller amount of illegal material online. As a matter of law, as attorney and legal analyst Graham Smith noted, the commission process reverses the normal presumptions of legality in favor of illegality, with safeguards so weak that companies will likely err on the side of taking down content.

The communication expressly avoids the problem of disinformation and propaganda. But regulation of such content may also be on the horizon, as the commission has announced creation of a High-Level Group to address it. Even the staunchest promoters of freedom of expression in European politics recognize that disinformation is a major problem. Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament and a leading proponent of respect for human rights in Europe, captured a widespread view on the continent when she said in parliamentary debate that she is ?not reassured when Silicon Valley or Mark Zuckerberg are the de facto designers of our realities or of our truths.?  

He goes on to point out a number of other problematic attacks on free speech in the name of “regulating the internet” — including the EU’s attempt at copyright reform. He concludes by noting we should be very, very concerned about how this will play out for free speech:

These rules should concern anyone who cares about freedom of expression, as they involve limitations on European uses of online platforms. European policymakers have good faith reasons to advocate them, such as countering rampant abuse at a time of human dislocation, political instability, and rise of far-right parties. Yet the tools used often risk overregulation, incentivizing private censorship that could undermine public debate and creative pursuits. Companies may be forced into the position of facilitating practices that undermine their customers? access to information. Europeans should be concerned, as many are.

Why should anyone else care? In the analog era, after all, a fair response in the United States to speech regulation across the pond (or anywhere else) might have been: that?s the way they do it in Europe. They have different experiences, giving some support (if very limited) to rules that U.S. courts would never permit?such as those against Holocaust denial or the glorification of terrorism.

But online space is different. All of the major companies operate at scale, and there is significant risk that troubling content regulations in Europe will seep into global corporate practices with an impact on the uses of social media and search worldwide. The possibility of global delinking of search results may be the most obvious form of content threat, but all of the rules and proposals noted above may slowly move to undermine freedom of expression. For instance, once a company invests the considerable funding required to develop sophisticated content filters for European markets, the barriers to applying them in American contexts are likely to come down.

There’s much more in Kaye’s piece and I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

One important point in all of this, which is noted in the quoted section above, but is worth repeating: most of the people pushing for these laws are not doing so with the intention of suppressing speech. Some may be doing so, but most of them really do have good intentions. The problem is that if you don’t live in the world of free speech (or spend time watching how speech is stifled in various ways) it’s often hard to realize how your “perfectly reasonable” attempt to stop some form of “bad” speech can be turned around and twisted, stretched and abused to silence all sorts of important speech. Even worse, it’s very difficult for many people proposing these rules to comprehend that their attempts to, say, silence Nazis online, will almost certainly be used to silence the most vulnerable. Tools to suppress speech are frequently used against the powerless, especially when they try to speak out against the powerful.

The fact that so many new regulations in Europe (not to mention elsewhere) are being pushed with little concern for or regard to the wider impact on free expression should concern us all.

Filed Under: david kaye, eu, europe, free speech, gdpr, regulations, right to be forgotten, social media