© Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images‘Whether for commercial or free speech reasons (or both), Google is informing sites when their content is blocked – perhaps in the hope that they will write about it.'
Stark evidence of this fact, the result of a European court ruling that individuals had the right to remove material about themselves from search engine results, arrived in the Guardian's inbox this morning, in the form of an automated notification that six Guardian articles have been scrubbed from search results.
The first six articles down the memory hole - there will likely be many more as the rich and powerful look to scrub up their online images, doubtless with the help of a new wave of "reputation management" firms - are a strange bunch.
Comment: And so we being to see real live examples of how history can so easily be manipulated - if you have access to and influence over the 'scribes' of the day.
Consider the same problem in the context of much older historical records and we see there is a huge problem with what has been passed on and taken now as historical 'fact' without a second thought. All it takes is influence and power over the scribes and history tells any story you want it to. Who owned what land, what tribe went from where to where, how and why wars were started and fought and so on and so on.
One of the lessons of history, is that much of it is founded on lies and manipulation of the facts.