Whitewashing your internet profile: political edition

Irish politicians are getting nervous. Although the government still insists it will serve out its full term, insiders are muttering about the possibility of a post-budget snap election. It's no coincidence, therefore, that they are now looking to clean up their online presence and two stories from this week are particularly telling.

First Alan Kinsella, of the invaluable Irish Election Literature website, tweets:

Have had a number of requests so far from candidates/election agents to take down their 2011 election material from the site #ge16

— Alan Kinsella (@electionlit) September 14, 2015

Second, an anonymous user from an Oireachtas IP address attempted a systematic (but ultimately unsuccessful) whitewashing of the Wikipedia entry for Senator Jim Walsh, deleting all reference to various gaffes by him through the years.

There's nothing new about attempts to suppress unfavourable information about Irish politicians - and the current stories are nowhere near the seriousness of the recent incident in which the aide to Derek Keating TD dumped several thousand copies of a local freesheet containing a critical story about his boss. But these examples still raise interesting issues for lawyers. In the case of the Irish Election Literature website - should politicians be able to invoke what would presumably be a copyright argument in order to conceal their past promises? In the case of Wikipedia, should edits made by TDs, Senators or their staff about themselves be disclosed? (Wikipedia certainly thinks so.) More generally, how should Irish law deal with sites such as Politwoops which archive deleted tweets from politicians? Is Twitter correct in saying that politicians should be able to delete their ill thought out tweets without that fact being highlighted - or should we accept that what politicians say is inherently newsworthy?

The Irish courts have yet to confront most of these issues - but it will be interesting to see what happens in an ongoing case brought by a Dublin election candidate who has invoked the "right to be forgotten" against online discussion of his election literature. Hopefully this will result in a judicial statement affirming the strong public interest in political discussion.

Irish newspapers have some curious views about search engines

The Irish newspaper industry seems to have chosen today for a bout of collective hyperbole about search engines. Here's what the Examiner had to say:

Work generated through effort, skill, imagination, professionalism, and usually considerable capital investment, is pirated by businesses with no connection to the creative process as a means to win revenue without risk or outlay. This process is hardly different to what we more commonly describe as theft. The scale of the piracy is astounding. In 2010, while every media company in the country shed jobs and cut costs to the bone, a single search engine operating in Ireland offered around 150,000 newspaper articles that cost publishers an estimated €46.5m to generate. Last year that site offered more than 350,000 articles at a cost equivalent to more than €110m. And all without paying one cent to those who created those articles.

There's more in the same vein from the Irish Times and the Independent.

Incredible, isn't it, that the newspapers are powerless to defend themselves against this "theft" and "piracy". Oh, wait - they're not. Instead, they've deliberately chosen to allow in search engines and to profit from the traffic which they generate.

Here's a non-technical explanation. You don't have to allow your site to be indexed by search engines. If you don't want your site to appear on Google you can use a simple file, known as robots.txt, which tells search engines what they can and can't do. The Examiner has one, as does the Irish Times and the Independent. So do they tell these "pirates" and "thieves" to keep out? Absolutely not. In fact, all three provide sitemaps for search engines which summarise their sites and make them easier to index, while both the Irish Times and the Independent provide specific instructions for the "Mediapartners-Google" searcher. Why do they do this? Because of a business decision that they benefit from the readership which added visibility in search engines generates.

The tone of the piece in the Examiner is entirely deceptive: far from being the helpless victim of "theft" and "piracy", the newspaper has chosen, for its own commercial advantage, to allow its site to be indexed and to benefit from the resulting visitors. Should the newspaper object, it is free to opt-out at any point. But it is shoddy work to misrepresent the position to its readers in this way.