Anonymity after the fact

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Anonymity after the fact

Siobhain Butterworth, The Guardian’s ombudsman, writes about changing the content of past newspaper stories to please readers. When a news story’s life-after-publication was limited to dusty library stacks, an embarrassing anecdote could go safely unnoticed. But when it falls within the searching power of Google, it takes on a life of its own.

Butterworth writes about three people who had revealed their long-ago criminal acts for the newspaper, either in a blog post written for the paper or in the course of an interview with a reporter. All three had second thoughts after publication. The Guardian agreed, in each case, to change the person’s name to a pseudonym:

The established view is that a newspaper’s online archive is a historical record and that there is therefore a strong public interest in maintaining its wholeness, unless deletions or amendments are strictly necessary…It’s impossible to come up with rigid criteria, and decisions made on a case-by-case basis produce inconsistencies. Saying yes to all requests for the removal of material that causes the people concerned distress or hinders their employment prospects would be easier, but it’s a solution that, over time, will leave a patchy and unreliable record of what was published…A less extreme solution, which was adopted in the three cases mentioned earlier, is to replace a real name with a pseudonym and add a footnote explaining that the change has been made. It’s not ideal, but it’s preferable to re-writing history completely by deleting an article, blog post or letter and pretending that it didn’t exist.

I’ve had people email me, years after being mentioned on my personal blog, and asked to be anonymized or removed from the archives. In a couple of cases, I’ve done it. But a personal blog is not the same, of course, as The Guardian’s archives. Do you think The Guardian made the right call?

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Matt M.

I’d link to an email I sent the Netfuture newsletter on this very topic, but I find it a tad embarrassing. I was so much more vehement in the 90s.

The science fiction author David Brin has some good articles on this. http://www.davidbrin.com/privacyarticles.html
Betty Salerno

Pseudonyms are wonderful as opinions change over time. However, anonymity can cover many crimes.
http://commonsensej.blogspot.com Doug Fisher

One of the first studies of this issue — the sanctity of archives and editors’ views toward changing them — was done by myself, Larry Timbs and Will Atkinson and published last year in Grassroots Editor
http://www.mssu.edu/iswne/grpdfs/winter07.pdf
http://www.viewmagazine.tv david dunkley gyimah

There’s another side to this.

What if you’re contacted by someone who has a spent conviction, but still finds their details relating to that reported crime appearing high on the newspaper’s g. rankings?

Do you amend the page / pull it down?

Or do you stick to your guns, claiming what was written back then is a record and should not be erased.

Two national UK newspapers faced the very dilemma and a senior exec of one of them says they took different paths.

David
viewmag (UK)
http://www.dailytidings.com Mike Green

Recently, a man contacted me and pleaded for roughly five minutes on the phone to have his name erased from our online archives. The problem? He had done something that caused his arrest and conviction. he subsequently served his time and integrated into society in a positive way. He was trying to improve his new career status but each Google search brought back his past. That became his new focus — mitigating his circumstances by manipulating the online record of his past.

We had a pleasant conversation, which wasn’t easy given his adamant demands. But I explained to him that as a newspaper, we cover what occurs in our community. At times, the news is bad and sometimes it’s horrific. The people in the news, and the families impacted by our coverage, would all unionize to lobby the paper to erase history if such coordinated efforts were even possible. But the paper does have a responsibility to society as well, doesn’t it?

We ended in congenial disagreement.

Did I do the right thing by holding fast to the “sanctity” of the public record established by our newspaper?
http://japanman.wordpress.com Ian Duncan

When I worked for a student newspaper this sort of thing was an utter nightmare. Around two years ago people were just starting to get into Facebook and really realise that their online profile mattered.

Many times we didn’t post stories online and only published them in the 5000 copies of the newspaper that would promptly be forgotten. As a local paper with a small distribution we thought this would reduce any defamation risk to the point where people wouldn’t care.

But another problem was we had gossip columns going back a number of years too. As google indexing of PDFs has became better, more and more potentially embarrassing material began to surface.

When the paper’s website was given an overhaul, no decision was made about the archives so they haven’t been maintained because that’s the path of least resistance. It’s a real shame because there’s a lot of great material in that archive that no one can access anymore.
http://juliusbeezer.blogspot.com Julius Beezer

It never ceases to amaze me how most people seem utterly immune to this concern before they post, wherever.

I started using the internet in 1994. Back then the advice was: if you don’t want your information to be public, don’t put it on the internet. I also had a boss whose standard for ethics was that you should judge the morality of every action by whether you would like to explain it live on television. So you thought hard before hitting send on even the most trivial email, never mind “authoring a webpage.”

The result is that I take rather a hard line with those who wish to expunge their former idiocies online. Let’s face it, you were an idiot then, it’s a material consideration for someone considering whether you’re an idiot now.

Perhaps some sort of system of retraction that preserved the original but allowed some sort of rehabilitative link in which the penitent miscreant can explain how they have atoned for their error. After all, it is a harsh world with no forgiveness.

Now I’m retired, I prefer the relaxation of posting under a pseudonym… ;-)

Tags: anonymity, corrections, editing, The Guardian

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