Is it possible to legally have online articles removed?

[Lbnc2021]

Posting here for traffic

A few years ago a friend was accused of a crime and it went to court. They were found not guilty. They really were innocent of the crime and it wasn’t a case of the prosecution couldn’t prove beyond reasonable doubt.

However news articles of the charge are still found on Google. He has a pretty unique name as well.

He was recently dismissed from a fairly new job he had started during the probation period. To be fair at the time he said he wasn’t particularly keen on the job but needed the income regardless.

A few days ago he was chatting to one of his ex colleagues. Apparently the management decided to get rid of him when another colleague googled his name and this charge from 7 years ago came up.

Now he knows he would never be able to prove this was the reason he was dismissed but he is concerned that this will happen again and again.

He needs to check out the ‘right to be forgotten’, although it would only apply in the EU rather than globally.

Thank you, I’ll tell him about that!

Unfortunately this place is the home of "no smoke without fire" school of life. He'd be much better off changing his name.

I’d invoke the “right to be forgotten” but also disclose the situation in confidence to HR at any new job, assuming he can plausibly demonstrate his factual innocence.

@YouthfulIndiscretion

I’d invoke the “right to be forgotten” but also disclose the situation in confidence to HR at any new job, assuming he can plausibly demonstrate his factual innocence.

Since when should anyone have to "demonstrate their factual innocence" ? (Not quite sure what the difference between "innocence" and "factual innocence" either")

That post pretty much proves my point.

By “factual innocence” I mean what the OP said, that he didn’t do it and no reasonable person who’d looked at the facts could believe that he did, rather than that the prosecution couldn’t prove an element of the case. In some cases it’s reasonably simple to show innocence to a reasonable person, eg if someone else was found guilty of the crime, or the judge’s remarks when the case was abandoned make it clear that the case was brought based on an error.

If he’s not in that situation then then I agree that he may have serious life-long trouble with “no smoke without fire”.

A friend of mine was found not guilty of a crime, and it was reported in the local paper. Years later he politely asked that it be removed and it was. But this was only one local paper and a minor crime.

He can also take a look at the following link which gives some information on right to be forgotten.
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-request?complaint_type=rtbf&visit_id=637202230061146146-20083139&rd=1

Also, I used to do SEO work, and he may be able to push the search results down to page two where they are less likely to be seen. He should make sure he has a personal website, linked in, Twitter etc. All nice and professional. If they are ‘better’ results than the local news article, they’ll be prioritised.