Indonesia, Too, Drops Down the Memory Hole

First Belguim, then Italy, now Indonesia. Another country has warped the "right be be forgotten" -- the misguided notion that embarrassing material can be effectively hidden online by removing links from search results -- to justify Orwellian censorship and rewriting of the past.

Italy Limits History to Two Years

I recently wrote about the highest court in Belgium holding that the European "right to be forgotten" required a newspaper to remove a 22-year-old article from its archive, down George Orwell's memory hole. Now Italy's highest court has limited the retention time for articles subject to "right to be forgotten" complaints to a scant two years.

Thus the "right to be forgotten" is becoming a way of "forgetting" the past, by forcing the removal of evidence of it.

Belgian Court Turns "Right to Be Forgotten" Into a Black Hole

The highest appellate court in Belgium has held that the European "right to be forgotten" -- which has generally been understood to require the removal of irrelevant and outdated information from search engine results, while keeping the original online material intact -- requires a newspaper to replace the name of a man who asserted rights under the principle with an "X" in an article on his 1994 drunk driving conviction, which was expunged in 2006.