Can things be scrubbed off the internet?

[ThighMistress]

There are occasionally posts alluding to or even claiming that various bits of rf/H/M activity or pictures have been “cleaned” from the internet.

How so? Surely someone somewhere would have a screenshot or original photo. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t, but if I had a story or photo about one of them - and perhaps I needed the money - I would be on the blower to the DM etc.

Surely if any or all of these rumours were true, there would be some evidence somewhere. We’re not in the era of Edward & Mrs Simpson when the public was clueless!

Of course they can

That would be a large part of the 'royal ' PR spend

They can also pay for google search manipulation so only 'approved'stories appear for pages

If you were born to a senior royal then it is trickier because there will always have been an interest in your life.
If you coupled up early with such a royal (like Kate - barely out of her teens) then there isn't going to be much to scrub anyway.
If you were born fairly ordinary, haven't found significant fame and start a relationship to such a royal after several other long ones, then there is a small window of opportunity to scrub the stories before your dating status is made public. It will benefit you the most.

This is pure speculation. I have never come across any such action being taken, nor any suggestion it’s possible. I have seen lawyers in the US discussing whether it’s possible there, with the consensus being it would be nigh impossible because of the USA’s First amendment free speech protection. The website/publisher could not be compelled to remove information it had legally published.

Ironically it’s easier for normal people in the UK and Europe to scrub their past misdeeds from the internet as GDPR allows individuals “a right to be forgotten”. So, after a period of time, you can request the information to be removed from the organisation that holds it/websites that have published it. You can also ask search engines like Google to remove links to the information from Google Search.

There is however an exemption if the information is in the public interest. Past misdeeds of public figures (royals, politicians etc) will generally fall into that category and therefore the person in question could ask for the information to be removed, but their request will likely be denied. It would also be a disastrous case of the Barbra Streisand effect in many cases. Asking for information to be deleted from various online sources could just draw even ore attention to the information you want suppressed!

It’s been rumoured that some politicians try to run spoiling tactics instead - Boris Johnston allegedly once spoke randomly about how he liked to build model buses out of cardboard boxes so that when searched, you’d have to go back several pages to find entries about the £350m Brexit promise that he had written on the side of a bus etc etc. Who knows if that’s true or not? It’s a good story, though!

This is not how the internet works...

The Queen having bone cancer was in the mainstream Canadian press online in Sept 2021. Arrived home and was very surprised no-one knew and searches here online brought up nothing.

Yes

There used to be an archived version of The Tig, but now there is only an authorised version (which is not complete) and the full versions appear to have vanished

Firstly, things get published overseas that the British press know about but chose not to publish, generally but not always due to UK privacy laws. Speculation about the Queen’s medical conditions could easily fall within that category.

Secondly, your internet search engine knows where you are and brings up relevant search results from that location as its first responses. So, if you’re searching online in the UK, and UK press haven’t published anything about the topic you are searching, you wont’ get any UK hits (obviously) and it may not bring you up foreign ones either.

The website is still viewable in the way back machine:

web.archive.org/web/20170203052403/thetig.com/48-hours-in-instanbul/

web.archive.org/web/20170125222249/thetig.com/how-to-be-both/

web.archive.org/web/20140625050916/thetig.com/

But if, say, someone had been in prison, or been at sea, or all manner of other things, could these be made to disappear?

I think that these days you can’t erase things completely ever, so rumours must be false.

Similar to you asking about if someone had been in prison: someone I know was found guilty of insider trading in the USA, and it had a moderate amount of press coverage. I saw it maybe 8 or 9 years ago, when randomly googling some people I used to be at school with in a "I wonder what happened to?" way. Couple of years ago, I looked for her again to see how her life had worked out since, but all mention of her has vanished. Just checked again now, all news reports, other career stuff about her, all gone, so I wondered if 'the right to be forgotten' covers blue collar crime.

It does, yes ChevreChase .

The right to be forgotten is designed to allow people individuals to get on with their lives without being perpetually judged as a consequence of something that happened in the past. This principle already exists in the UK in relation to several categories of past convictions, as they are treated as “spent” after several years have passed, and the individual no longer has to disclose them.

So, if your past conviction is the type that becomes spent you have a legal to be treated as if you had never committed the offence. If there is information online about it you can make a strong case that the information is now outdated and inappropriate, and should be removed under data protection law. Given insider dealing is not a crime that involves violence or generally harm to others, I can see why information about it on the internet would be suppressed.

@noodlezoodle
See below - several posts describe how google can be manipulated

Did you think I meant google are paid directly for the service lol ?

Look at the Boris incident when he said something about 'painting buses' . Strange thing to say. Some think it was done to push the nhs promise plastered on buses down the google search result pages

The public are manipulated in lots of ways . The old 'daily fail' model of reading your propaganda is almost dead .
Polls are used to imply a majority believes certain things - look and see who owns the polling organisation.

Bots are used to endlessly post on SM - they are sometimes rumbled because they cut and paste the same text .

Sorry, I meant white collar. I suppose pre-internet none of us would have been able to find things out so easily as we do now, we just take it for granted that the information is just there. Until one day it isn't!

My friend married into a billionaire family. Her SIL used to be very prominent in the family business, her photo in the news all the time. During that time she gained loads of weight and had some bad plastic surgery that she later regretted. She lives a private life now and if you Google her there are no photos of her online, anywhere. Money can buy pretty much anything.

Do you know how hard you have to search for articles about Camilla that date back to the 80s/90s? She is so fucking lucky that the majority or her public shenanigans happened before the internet and social media were a thing.

And the answer to your ridiculous post is right there…in your post!

The articles about Camilla that date back to the 80s and 90s were published in hard copy newspapers as they were the only medium that then existed. If you wanted to to look them up, you had to go to the British Library’s Colindale newspaper archive, where past hard copies and microfiches were stored (I had to do that a couple of times for work. The archive has moved to Yorkshire now though).

Online newspaper publishing was in its infancy even in 2000 - the Telegraph had a micro site and the Guardian launched online in 1999. So if you want to find online copies of past articles from before online newspapers were even in existence, you are completely reliant on the newspapers and institutions like the British Library digitising them. Which they are doing, but it’s a slow process (it was estimated in 2015 that only 10% of the past newspapers had been digitised to date) and the records are generally stored in digital archives. If you’ve ever had to use an online archive system, you will know very well that the things you want don’t just pop up in a Google search!

As for Camilla being so fucking lucky that she lived much of her life before the digital age - all those stories you are looking for still exist you know. they are there, publicly available for you or anyone else to read if you want to go to the British Library Archive. The Royal Family don’t and can’t do anything to get those stories removed from the public record. So why would they bother to get stories removed from online sources now?

🤣 about no online articles from the 80s - in my first job on a newspaper in 1987 I used a manual typewriter!!

There used to be loads of photos of Kate smoking which have all disappeared now.

There were never very many photos of her smoking taken I don’t think though? She’s smoking in the topless photos taken of her by a paparazzi with a super long lens in the South of France. Those pictures are still available online, by the way. So yes, of course they’d remove a handful of pictures of her smoking and leave the topless ones taken illegally up there.

(I genuinely think a lot of posters don’t realise how internet search engines work here! In most cases this information is still there, but it’s not necessarily being retrieved in response you your request)

If you search, you will also find photos of Meghan smoking and partying hard too.

So, what I’m asking then, is that if proof is somewhere out there, then certain rumours must be untrue? Otherwise internet-savvy sleuths would have found evidence of this, that or the other.

There are companies who specialising in cleaning your references on the internet. They're expansive to engage and from what I recall, at least one seems to have former members of the Israeli secret service in it - ie it's highly skilled work. It's not simply about manipulating Google.

So yes, there are ways to get things removed. There's no way to get them removed if they're copied and continuously reposted though. Although manipulating Google could help in making them less visible.

So there are three parts to things existing online (four if you count people downloading, screenshotting, photographing things online and keeping them offline)

Currently published and easily found by search engines

Currently published - existing on a website somewhere but not easily found using a search engine

Previously published - since deleted but an archived/cached version still available online (wayback machine etc)

When someone wants to scrub their online history - they can aim to delete anything currently published - easy if you were the one who published it, harder if it was someone else - that involves tracking down the source of each published item and making them take it down (money, legal threats etc)

Anything you can't remove you can try to bury - as a PP mentioned above - flood the search engines with more recent stuff about you or the topic you are trying to bury and the stuff you don't want to come up is 10, 20 or more pages back - most people are too lazy to click through that far.

Online reputation management companies can be hired to do a combination of the above. They can also liaise with internet archive sites like archive.org and try to get things removed from those caches too.

It's infinitely harder to do when you are in the public eye and things are being published and re-curated constantly by news sites but enough money and it's possible - just takes a lot of man power and hours.

So to relate that to the Kate's smoking pictures - they are all still there it's just there are millions of other photos of her not smoking since then that the search engine is returning more recent, more popular (clicked on) photos of her. And loads of other Kates smoking.

One of my relatives does this for a living, manages ‘online reputations’, there are ways to get things removed, but creating new stuff in such a way as to manipulate whatever anyone can find (ie not the bad stuff) seems to be what she does more of. Much more complex than just adding a few puff pieces though! I’ve no idea if the royal family employs such services, but I would imagine so to some degree.