"On Feb. 17, Forbidden Stories and a media conglomerate, including OCCRP [Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project], published a series of investigative reports exposing the abuses and illegalities of the Spanish company ELIMINALIA. The company's services focus on aiding politicians and journalists to remove or de-index from any digital platform, web host or search engine, content that 'compromises' or 'causes harm' to their clients (at the request of the interested party) for a fee.
Since 2016, ARTICLE 19 has documented and exposed cases where ELIMINALIA has been involved and activated its services through mechanisms that involve the misnamed 'right to be forgotten' by fraudulently abusing legislations such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union) and the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). In this sense, the cases are activated by means of the DMCA or GDPR specifically aimed at removing journalistic investigations, alleging that they contravene copyright or personal data protection provided by European Union privacy legislation. The company has even used Mexico's General Law for the Protection of Personal Data in Possession of Private Parties (LGPDPPP, by itsSpanish acronym) as a way of pressuring journalistic investigations to be removed under threat of legal action.
ARTICLE 19's analysis of the documented cases has uncovered a pattern in which requests to remove or de-index journalistic content are related to cases of corruption, organized crime and other issues that are of interest to society."
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