Radiolab - Right to be Forgotten

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

In online news, stories live forever. The tipsy photograph of you at the college football game? It’s there. That news article about the political rally you were marching at? It’s there. A charge for driving under the influence? That’s there, too. But what if... it wasn’t? Several years ago a group of journalists in Cleveland, Ohio, tried an experiment that had the potential to turn things upside down: they started unpublishing content they’d already published. Photographs, names, entire articles. Every month or so, they met to decide what content stayed, and what content went. In this episode from 2019, Senior Correspondent Molly Webster takes us inside the room where the editors decided who, or what, got to be deleted. And we talk about how the “right to be forgotten” has spread and grown in the years since. It’s a story about time and memory, mistakes and second chances, and society as we know it. Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John

Hey, this is Radio Lab, I'm Soren Wheeler. I'm sitting in today for Lulu and Latif because I have a show that I want to look back on. A little rewind into our past, something we do every other week. Which means that some of you may have already heard this one, but not to fear, we'll be back with Brand Spanking New Content next week. And also this is a really good story, and it's one that feels to me This is a really good story and it's one that feels to me as relevant, if not more relevant today than it was when we aired it. And on top of that, at the end of the show, I will have an update from our senior correspondent Molly Webster, who reported this piece and together with our former producer, Bethel Habtay, put it together.

Anyway, the show is called The Right to Be Forgotten, originally released in 2019. And what you'll hear is Molly telling the story to our host at the time, Chad Avram Robb. Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay.

All right. Okay. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio. Radio from W and wife All right, here's a good one His this is a guy who's murder conviction overturned But he he shot and killed somebody. I mean this is violence, right? It ends up not being a crime, but he took somebody's life with a gun.

He, his position is... Hey, I'm Chad Epping. We're out of this radio lab and we're gonna start off today with a conversation that happened in a conference room somewhere in Ohio. Let's see, so... Okay, so maybe just how I got to Cleveland.

Yeah, so maybe we me walk us through that. Comes to us from our reporter Molly Webster. So it was like September. We were looking around for stories for something. One of our challenges, like bears or bad news, breaking things. And so, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but I'm from Ohio.

Really? Yeah, I know, shocking. And so I thought, oh, I'll pull the Ohio card right now. I'm gonna look at this online news site, Cleveland.com. But there's nothing in the story that is like harm. I mean, yes, it says he shot someone, but he did shoot someone. I think I saw a headline on their homepage

about the right to be forgotten. So the information about the case is preserved. It's just when you search his name, it doesn't come up. Wait, time out. This is a room full of people trying to figure out if someone has the right to be forgotten. I didn't actually know, so I just emailed the guy. Hello.

Hello, who'd written about the experiment. This is Chris. Chris Quinn. I am the editor of Cleveland.com. He's basically the headhuncho. I started at the plane dealer in 1996 as a reporter. So Chris's story is he started out at the print newspaper, the Cleveland plane dealer, and he did, he was a reporter.

He did that for about five years and he moved on to become an editor. And then in 2013, they created an entirely new newsroom that they asked me to lead. He basically became the editor-in-chief of their online paper, Cleveland.com. And what we really were trying to do was figure out what kind of content does the digital audience want? Once he moved online, it was like the audience was different, the format was different, the speed which they had to put up stories was different. We're putting this up now.

But there was one part of the online process that kind of stuck out to him and it had to do with time and memory. Yeah, this actually it began, I think it was in 2014 when I first wrote about it. Back in the day, if you did something stupid, got arrested and ended up in the paper. If it's in the paper, as it was for decades, it's printed in the paper. People would read it in the morning and then they'd throw it out. And it drops out of sight. It's not easy to find.

I mean, there's some newspapers that kept indexes that would be at the library. But even with those, you'd have to go to the library, know there was an index, look up a person's name, and get to it. And if someone really wanted to find it, they'd probably have to spend hours or days just scrolling through micro-feesh slides to finally maybe discover that thing about you from your past.

But now that everything is online, it's there always and forever. So if you're going on a date, it's there. If you're going for a job, it's there. It just never goes away. It's right up front forever. So it was Cleveland.com started putting up all these stories about, you know, people driving drunk or vandalizing property or streaking across the football field. Chris started getting these emails. I am requesting that my name be removed from the January's request from people to take down stories about them. I made a big mistake, owed up to it and paid for it.

The situation has had a horrific effect on myself and my entire family. Because they're embarrassed or it hurts their ability to get jobs. The article below appears through the top of any search using my name and the word attorney. These stories have come up in every job interview I've had in the last five years. It has hurt my career. Or their children are getting older and might find them. That article is a nightmare for me. It has caused trauma to myself and my children in our normal lives.

I have two daughters, 11 and 14 years old. We were the cause of some major suffering. I have suffered depression. Birmingham people a lot and crushing them psychologically. I'm just in a corner and don't know what to do. It didn't feel good, but we didn't address it at the time. We kind of put it aside and didn't act on it. Why not?

Well, I mean, editors all across the country were getting these emails. But there was a longstanding feeling that we're the first version of history and that these archives are sacrosanct and you would never change them. Journalists, like as a profession, have this idea that they are the first draft of history or the public record and you just don't mess with that. And every month I get more of these requests from somebody saying your story is wrecking my life. Can't you please take it down? And every time I'd be hard-line, we don't do that. But the number of these continues to increase. And man, when you read them, these are people that are imploring you to help them

overcome a mistake. And in the end, we had enough of these in a row where it was, In the end, we had enough of these in a row where it was, okay, we do not want to be the agent of suffering. So Chris made an announcement. This was the column that I read and it said something like, you know, if you've had an article written about you and it was by us and you want it taken down or, I don't know, your name deleted or something, send us an email and we'll consider it. And I just thought, who has the right, like who has the right to be forgotten

or who doesn't have the right to be forgotten, who's making those decisions, what are the kinds of things that they're thinking about when they're deciding who to delete and who not to delete? And so when I was talking to Chris, I was asking him all of this. And for reasons I don't entirely understand, he just said, I mean, you're welcome to listen in.

You know, why don't you just come see for yourself? We, we, we talking out, just acknowledging this continues to be very much an experiment. So that brings me into the room. Hey, I'm Molly Webster. Hi. It's a pleasure to meet you. So they meet about once a month. When I visited, there were seven people in the room. Hi, I'm Toru. I'm Molly.

Pretty standard issue conference room. There was the special projects manager, the social media editor, the public advocacy manager, crimes editor. We have Mike Ann Mark, a former rock critic who is now the head of the culture desk, Mark, Mike and sports editor. You're...

David? Okay, okay. We all sit around a long table. Chris outlines the rules of engagement. We're not gonna name the people as we talk about them. We'll just use the numbers for the cases. Andy, number. Well, yeah. And everyone has in front of them this document that's about 50 pages, it has 12 different

cases outlined and each case has got the articles attached to it, the statement of the person about what they want removed, is it a name or a mug shot, and a personally for why they want it taken down. Yeah, cool. We ready to start? Yes. All right, so this is an attorney that I mean, there's one sentence really about him caught up in another case. It did plea to a misdemeanor and did have it exposed.

I mean, this would seem to me to me a no-brainer and... But he's an attorney charged with obstruction of justice. He pleaded guilty with obstruction of justice. He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. I'm Mr. Meena Charge, I was charged with justice. Quick note, for a morass of legal and ethical reasons we are going to try to keep all the people we talk about anonymous so you're going to hear a number of bleeps. Torious case, he was the same minor figure in it. But the other two are kind of useful. I was like, hi, I'm a lawyer. I want to know that this happened.

You do want to know that he would obstruct justice on your behalf because it gets you off. Well, I think it's, it's, it's, it's a public service to leave his name up so that people know. I just know only because of the positive of information that's in this story about it's all the right That's it. Yeah, you have no context. You don't know what and he's not the record It's something yeah, but he's saying

So one of the first things that happened was that they started getting in these arguments about how much value an Article had and whether or not it was serving a public good That's the that's the use that journalist point to we do need names about how much value an article had and whether or not it was serving a public good. That's the use that journalists point to. We do need names. We need to put names to these arrests because it's part of the public record. This is Kalamak Bride.

She's an ethicist at the Pointer Institute. I did have this experience where my kid was on a soccer team and there was this coach who seemed really questionable to me in his behavior and the way that he acted around the kids. And sure enough, on the mugshot site in my local hometown, this guy showed up for domestic violence.

And so I went to the athletic director and I was like, hey, this kind of can't be working for us. And that's the use that journalists point to is that you should be able to find out the bad information about somebody because you might be considering employing this person around your children or really employing them at all. And to do get the idea back in the room, you know, the whole sense of like, if I'm one of his customers,

I would probably want to know that. There was a lot of debate. Is this thing the lawyer did bad enough that all of us need to know about it? But he's still licensed to practice law, right? I mean, the law is, I mean, the bar here, I mean, they're pretty thorough about, you know, looking at this stuff and deciding whether somebody is fit to practice law. You know, I mean, the bar didn't do anything to him. And so one of the big questions is how do we make that judgment? Should we follow the courts?

You can hear them putting a lot of weight on whether or not a court has sealed or expunged a record, which is basically the court making this decision to remove the case from its own record. I mean, this is sealed. We're relying on a court that said, yes, you've done your time, you can have it sealed. So we would need a very strong argument here not to do that. You want to make your argument stronger, Laura? I'm dead.

All right, I mean, no, I guess. Does anybody wanna make a strong argument here? All right. But I chicken. In the end, they decided that this lawyer dude had the right to be forgotten. And so they just sort of like, whew, whew, whew, vanished his name from the article. they decided that this lawyer dude had the right to be forgotten. And so they just sort of like, like,

managed his name from the article. And that was one of the simpler ones. Like after that, things definitely got tougher because some of the cases they talked about were so complicated, like someone who killed somebody. And then it was labeled self-defense. And I was like, well, that's,

is, I mean, it's not murder, murder, but that's like still killing someone. Like, does that person have the right to be forgotten? And then one of the hardest cases. All right, on the fourth one, he did have it expunged. He was actually a cop. His record was sealed. But, you know, it is a police officer.

It's theft and off. But over the course of a few years, he lied on his time sheet and walked away with thousands of dollars. We've said, on the front end of this, that sex crimes, violence crimes and corruption were much less likely to do this. So I guess this comes down to, would you view this as corruption, or do you view this more as a guy who was theft and office kind of thing?

The cop in his email plea to the group, he said basically, look, I've been on the force for many years, I've never had an issue, I shouldn't have done this, I know that, but this was just one mistake. You know, this was not some elected official. This was not use of force. You know, I mean, this guy got, this guy was skimming over time.

You know, I think, but again, you know, when the firefighters were having time stuff too, I mean, that was a big problem. So it's, but this is one guy doing one thing. I, I, like, I'm so back and forth on this one. But he didn't abuse his authorities and officer. He's still from his employer. I mean, this is like any other theft. Yeah, but I hold him to a higher standard

for being copped in first place. It was interesting. You could see people's just like opinion shift. This was not a momentary lapse in judgment. This went on for like, years it was like, right? And it's only been years since this story ran. And so, I don't know, that means something to me.

Like this was an ongoing thing about what he had going. Taken the money, the extra money. And I went with Mark. Like the public trust issue here, this isn't some, you know, water department guy, Skim and Copper off the, you know, some job site. Like this is a police officer stealing over time

over the course of years. I mean, that's a veteran as he described himself, I believe. But I think that it's, yeah, I mean, I guess I see that. I don't know, I first read this and I was like, yeah, I mean, I guess I see that. I don't know, I first read this and I was like, yes, I think we should let him be forgotten. But now, I'm kind of on the other side. Like, I think, because it's not a ton of money, it's not a public threat to people, but because he is in a position of trust and a public position tax taxpayer money, I think you guys are right

when you're saying he should be held to a higher standard. Well, but remember, get back to our central question. Is the value of having his name there greater than the pain that's causing him for being there? Again, and again, Chris just steered the conversation back to that question, which is, does the value of having this article up outweigh the harm it's causing someone? But the trick with that question is, how do you know what information will be valuable in the future?

I mean, if we put this story behind a wall and other police departments, don't see it, what stops them from going to be to get a job if he gets it sealed and this story goes away Other other offices might not be I wonder if he lost his We should look that up. We should do the research because if if I mean we're talking about another Tamir Rice case That's 12 year old Tamir rice waving a hovering over the conversation was what happened to Tamir rice 12 year old Tamir Rice waving a... Hovering over the conversation was what happened to Tamir Rice. 12 year old Tamir Rice holding a toy gun. So in 2014 in Cleveland police officer shot and killed Tamir Rice after they saw him holding a toy gun.

The two policemen said that rice was worn three times to show his hands, but no bystander heard that or any warning before the shots. I did not know this, but the cop who shot and killed Tamir Rice before he worked in Cleveland, he worked in another police department where he was deemed unfit to serve. And then when the Cleveland Police Department was hiring him, they didn't dig into his records, and then the other police department didn't like offer the records and since it had never been a news story that was Googleable, like no one knew about it, so he was hired.

If all records of this disappear and he applies to be a cop again, you're, you're, it would be basically our fault that he's able to do bad things. And so in this case, one of the thoughts in the room is, what if one of these people does something horrendous, right? What if in a future year, they go in and kill 17 people, wouldn't you want to know about their past transgressions? I actually talked about this with Chris

in one of our interviews. I mean, wouldn't that make those past transgressions relevant again? And he told me that when they do decide to delete someone. We're keeping a spreadsheet of the names that we've taken out that very limited access. Wow, that feels like a crazy, powerful spreadsheet. Yeah, I know.

I, I, Is it in a vault or something? I'm not sure, like I keep saying is this is an experiment and we're not, we're not there yet. So in the end, what did they decide to do with the... With time she got guy? Yeah.

They did not delete him. Oh, wow. Was that like a unanimous or was it a like split decision? I think no, I actually think by the end that once Tamir Rice walked into the room, you could kind of feel the energy shift to the non-deletion side. Wow. So they just sort of like wrapped it up,

decided not to delete him, and then like onto the next case, which is a very good one, and we'll get to it after the break. OK, radio lab will continue in a moment. I'm Chad Abumarad, this is Radio Lab. We're back with Molly Webb's and the right to be forgotten. Yes. And I have a question for you. Yes. The Cleveland.com newsroom.

Are they the first people to do this situation? No, no. It's definitely happening all across the country. Around the country, newsrooms are tearing their hair out, trying to figure out how to deal with this. That's pointer ethicist, killing me right again. Because there are thousands and thousands of people who did one stupid thing.

And that is the thing that the internet remembers them for. And one of the things I found out was that it is a huge conversation, but not a lot of people are openly talking about it. And all of these kind of quiet conversations seem to be happening now because of something that's like bubbling up in Europe. What's bubbling up in Europe. What's bubbling up in Europe? Well, so basically what happened was in Spain, and this guy, Mario, in 1998, he had basically gone into bankruptcy, at which point the local newspaper published an announcement about it, and then 10 years go by. Mario cleaned up, got his money back, got his life back on course.

And so he reaches out to the newspaper, and he was like, Hey, I've cleaned up my life. Can you take this bulletin down? So it doesn't show up on the internet. And the newspaper says no. Do you know why they said no? Because I think... Yeah, we published this.

This is local news. Public record. Public archive. Public record. Public record. Done. And then he goes to Google and he says, this, this is local news, public record, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, first test, court of the European Union and in 2014 the judges in this European case make a decision that if something is out of date irrelevant or not accurate, a person can request a search engine to take it down.

So in Europe you can petition to have things taken off the internet? Yeah and it's, it is this moment where like a new right is established. This is when you start to hear the phrase right to be forgotten. The unfortunate element of human remembering is that because our brain forgets automatically, we never had to deal with deliberate forgetting. This is Victor. Victor Mayorschenberger, professor of Internet governance, Oxford University. I called him up when I was trying to figure out what was happening in Europe. We can't deliberate forget. If I tell you, please forget that my second name is Michael.

You will remember that. It's the exact opposite. And so the problem is we don't know how to disregard memories of our past. We don't know how to forgive if we remember. And so as we become a remembering society, we become an unforgiving society. So he is a strong proponent of policies that help us forget even just a little bit. And that's the point that I wanted to make. I'm not in favor of annihilating memories. I'm in favor of putting them

into shoebox and stashing them in the attic so that if you really want to make the effort to go up there, you can take them down, you can read them, pour your Excel for Glass of wine and go through them. But you don't stumble over them every day. And at some level, I think that's part of the thinking behind the European Union policy. Like, can we just take some of our stuff and put it back in the attic? And pretty much everyone I spoke to here said, a Mario type of case is coming. I mean, basically the consensus is this is going to start going to court in the states. Really? When the European Union went with a right to be forgotten, I started to look at that thinking,

is that we shouldn't have a law like that here because of the First Amendment, but is that something as an industry we should consider? And Chris is like, we got gotta do something, but we don't want it to be a law because of the First Amendment. We still want editorial independence. So why don't we just figure it out on our own? And this is like every newsroom figuring it out for themselves. That seems to be the moment that we're in right now.

You do really get the sense that it's like on the fly, they're figuring it out as they go, but then you think at what point do rules come into play? If you do everything on a case-by-case basis by its very nature, it is subjective. All right, this is a good one. It's college kid who got involved in... So one of the cases that Chris and the other editors

talked about while I was there was this college student who got involved in a drug operation. We're not gonna say which drug and he was doing it with some friends and we're not gonna say how many. And this is one of the kids asking us. Again it's it's going back, it's 20 it is college kid doing something very very stupid but you know what you know, what do you, I mean, it's gonna dog him for the rest of his life if it stays on our site. Everybody knows about it. Yeah, but this is a college kid doing something really dumb.

I mean, it's bad. Even he was enabling people to do drugs. A year's later, he's trying to get on with his life. So the first thought you hear in the room is just oh my god We were all idiots in college. We should take these articles down. I didn't have an issue with this one But if somebody does speak up, I mean, but then on the other side something to me that's different between and

You know selling pot on the side when you're in college or something getting comfortable you know, selling pot on the side when you're in college or something and getting caught for it. Or even selling drugs and other drugs. So it seemed to me like, you're years, I don't know if that's long enough for me to think like, let's take this down. Like, never been doing things stupid when we were just in college, I guess.

Well, I did, but I did not. Now, look, I mean, look, I'm going to form a rock critic, right? So I'm like given to like give this guy a break. But it seems to me that judging from like some of the other cases we've looked at, this is fairly serious. He wasn't one of the ones that said they had, they were getting clean, right? Like he wasn't saying I was under the influence of drugs at the time. And, I mean, that's not an excuse but the conversation turns to okay who is he

does he deserve to be forgotten and to figure that out there are a ton of different questions you could ask you know is he sober is he reformed was he sober then how much time has passed how much time was he doing it are the other people in here having a difficult time getting jobs? I mean, there's a lot of unknowns here. You know, I mean, all these other people, their lives might be fine. Maybe there's another reason this guy isn't getting jobs, you know. We know that he hasn't done anything since then. His employer and he is seeking a job that he's not expunged. He's saying it's coming up in every job interview he has, right?

Does an employer have a right to know this? Does an employer, and he is getting it expunged. I mean, the other thing we could do is say, when your expungements complete, let us know and we'll take it down. But it's a year's later, he was in college, he was 25, he wasn't like, he was in college, he was 25, he wasn't like he was 18. But so, remove the fact that this is a clean cut kid who was going to a private college

and move this scenario to the same age, the same race, but not in college and in some rural community. And at this point, a question of race and class come into the room. All the editors are white. Most went to college themselves. Is that biasing them in some way? I mean, what are willingness to forgive this kid? Be different if the social economic issue changes here.

This isn't about forgiveness. It's about the idea that on our site, because we're so big, when you search for somebody, this is the first thing you find. And we haven't set any kind of economic strata for this. We haven't set a geographic strata. We're considering each case as it comes in. It's this case. Does this kid deserve to have his name removed? Is enough time passed?

Is it's not a crime of violence and corruption? I mean, that's really just a central question. As you heard, Chris reacted pretty abruptly to the word forgiveness being brought into the room. I don't think we are in a position to forgive. So I asked him about it after the meeting ended. I think it's almost presumptuous for me to think that I can forgive these people.

But I agree that is it. But in a sense, you've taken on, if we acknowledge these people and offer them respite, we'll help the rest of the world do that too. That, to me, sounds like forgiveness. Okay, I don't, I'm not, I don't feel like, we're forgiving the seven people who asked for this relief. I feel like we're enabling them to carry on with their lives without the baggage of the mistakes they made because society is very judgmental and if somebody looks them up, sees that they did this, it's a big mark against them.

I think what we can do is kind of revert back to the way things worked before the internet the way it used to be. Right. Well, if we think the answer to this is to find a way to unpublish everything that somehow we collectively think ought to be unpublished. That is a pipe dream. I ran Chris' thought by Debra Dwyer, who is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina

Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism. I was talking to her because she has been studying journalists and how they're approaching take-down requests in this whole like right to be forgotten issue. And basically what she told me is you can only delete so much. Yeah, no, we're never going to be able to eradicate our past. That day, that ship has sailed. But the power that we give an arrest report

from 10 years ago on a minor offense that some silly child did and they're now grown up and responsible and attempting to get into law school people actually have the power to determine how important that is, right? How much weight do we give that? Organizations I talked to said they were considering not covering arrests or court cases actual trials unless they could see them through their completion. Part of this might be being better about choosing on the front end what types of stuff we want to commit to digital memory. Part of this is a shifting R perspectives because if you can never totally forget something You have to learn how to forgive without forgetting right but we live in a world of

Revenge porn and mugshot extortion websites and public shaming and So is that the type of society we want to be? Because again, sometimes it's a society that's to forgive you for that thing you did 10 years ago. Well, likely not right now, but that information, there's never going to be a perfect way to clean up everyone's past. That is, we've got to learn to live with it. And if we can decide maybe that we ought to address it with a little bit of compassion, that gives me hope. We're not doing that one. I'm looking for one of the simple ones, just the delete. Yeah, for to delete. Yeah, for a delete.

Here's one. Okay. So this is just deleting like a two-centened paragraph maybe, or one-centened paragraph that just says his name, this guy's name. That's my name. Delete. And then I had a note at the top. It's that. This story was updated to remove someone's name and accordance with the Cleveland.com right to be forgotten policy.

You stick that right at the top. Oh, you put it in a date. Yeah. Right to the talent and say no. And then hit save. If you want to save. And it's gone. All right. Well, one person's going to be really happy when he Googles his name today. Yeah, right.

Because it all just changed. It all just changed. It'll take me a private, you know, I'll get to all of them by probably, well, the end of next week, because I'm going to be out of town in the beginning of the week. Cool. That's, I think this in the next week, so I'm gonna be out of town in the beginning of the week Cool That's I think this is where I leave you. Yeah, what's your flight? Well, I'm gonna stay a weekend, so I'm gonna leave so what did you walk away from the whole Cleveland experience thinking? that I was confused

that I Guess one of the things is that you can walk into that room you're making this decision and you don't have a lot of information to go off of. Like if you're lucky, you have an email, maybe a ceiling order and the articles that featured the person. And at times, that feels like not enough information.

You just think like, I want more. And then at other times, you think, gosh, it would be bad if we had more information because then I might just start like judging this person. And I might actually get more subjective. I don't know, but there's one more chapter to the story. Oh, while a very long while after I got back from Cleveland, I got an email from Chris. Okay. And it said that that day they had just done another round of right to be forgotten petitions and that he thought that one of the people would be interested in talking to me about what

they did and why they wanted to be deleted. So at that point I called this guy. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm okay. I this guy. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm okay. I'm nervous. I'm okay. Nervous is fair. I did a wrestling traffic, so I was a minute late. Let me just make sure everything's settled on my end. So I have you until noon. Is that right? What time do you need to get back to work?

You can I can be here longer if need be okay., we'll just like roll with it then. Let me power down my phone too. Yeah, so you know how, throughout this whole episode, we've been like bleeping out facts. We're going to keep doing that with this case. We'll just like hold back some information in some instances. We might change a fact.

Sure. It is obviously a risk for this guy to be talking to us. I'm going to give him the chance of anonymity, Sure. It is obviously a risk for the sky to be talking to us and We're going to give him the chance of anonymity But he is up for that risk. Well You go on a journey like this as As a person who really never Aside from a speeding ticket really never interacted with the criminal justice system and You it changes your whole way of thinking

and how you approach life and how you approach each day. And so by me, perhaps talking about it, maybe it gets people thinking about it and trying to gain understanding, I guess. So the story of this guy, should I give him a name, like a fake name? Yeah, give him a give him a, give him a, Seth. Seth. Okay. So back in the like 2000s,

2000 in teens, Seth was just like living a pretty solid life. He had a good job, a wife, two kids, and then over the course of a few weeks. I expose myself to two women. Once in his neighborhood in front of a woman who was driving by, the cop showed up later that day, but they just sort of gave him a warning.

We know nothing really happened until days later when I did it again. This time it was to another woman. And we'll just say it was at the gym. And sighted by police and everything started. I called my wife and I met her at a local park and I told her. He tells her what's happened. He tells her everything.

He tells her everything. He tells her everything. And part of what they talked about that day was something that had happened years before. Yeah. When I was 10 or 11, I was sexually abused. Now, I didn't think of it as abuse at the time. I felt a lot of guilt, a lot of shame. I thought I was in on it. So it was probably okay.

You know, that's what I was thinking. And I really didn't think it had an effect on me. But it did. Again, these are not excuses, but I think the really the most damaging thing was how I thing was how I was introduced to sex and how that became an issue and me not getting help for that. And again, I'm talking all about me, but I'm really frightened to women. And I'm just like, I'm just sorry, I'm just so sorry. Eventually Seth has to go down to the police station and get his mug shot taken and actually get charged, like misdemeanor charges against him. This was a couple weeks later when the police officer

called and they're actually gonna find charges come down to the police station. I went down, right away I'm like, okay, we gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta go. And I was wearing a hoodie and it just woken up and and no thought of my mind was like they're gonna take a mug shot but they did and I Molly if you ever get a sighted or ever get called police station you know take a shower wear something nice because it was so horrible picture. It's always there. I'm just a couple keystrokes away from my mug shot, from the worst picture I took, the worst day of my life.

So if this had just stayed in the court system, no one would have ever seen that mug shot, because Seth just gets to this point where he's like I just am guilty. I just want my I will plead guilty to everything. I don't want I Did it I want to take responsibility for it and I'm sorry He pays a fine serves probation We're told the issues some sort of statement of apology to the women I get to new therapist But then of course in the midst of, he gets a call from a local newspaper. Somebody had tipped them off that I had been

cited for decent exposure. From there, it was picked up by paper after paper and different like online news sites until it was all over the place. And you think about, you think about my, you know, my parents are still alive. What are they gonna? They're gonna read this in the paper my kids. Yeah, the place. And you think about my parents are still alive. What are they going to read this in the paper? My kids. Yeah. Just a lot of shame. And it's almost like you shame is what you deserve. And so by the time that stuff starts rolling out, he tells his kids, he ultimately loses his job. And the whole shame thing. So when I would walk around or go to the grocery store, things like that, and I'm sure it was

delusional, but I'm like, everybody's looking at me, there is pointing it out. And again, so my kids, my son goes off to college, meets people, they Google, and a unique name in a hometown, and there I am. So I think that that's really a big part of the damage is the family and they don't they didn't do anything. They don't deserve any of that. He said a particularly low moment was when his daughter came to him and said, uh, you're the number one news story. Oh, wow. You know how you can see like the top news stories for your area. If you're in a search engine, if you're doing like Google news or something, apparently

his story was the first one and it was his mug shot. And a really salacious story about me. And not that he didn't do a creepy dark kind of thing. Totally. But that's that's the heart of the question. Like how do you weigh the value of us knowing about Seth and what he did against the harm that it's doing to him and his family. You know, in this moment, all of us are probably making different decisions in our heads, but here's what actually happened. According to the law, a year after he's done everything the court asks him to do, he can apply to have his records sealed,

which he did, and the judge agreed. I think I got him finally sealed in May of this year. And no one has access to the judges thinking the records are sealed, but not long after that, he saw that Cleveland.com was doing this right to be forgotten thing. And so he was like, oh, that could be me. Like, I could do this. I wasn't sure if I'd get approved, but I still had hope when I sent it, tried to craft a good email, really state my case as much as I could. So I have the letter that

Seth wrote to the right to be forgotten team at Cleveland.com, and I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but just to give you a few excerpts, it says, years have now passed since my mental crisis and my very public and salacious brush with the law. I am grateful for a few things. The love and support of my family guided me out of the darkness. I am here and not in a cemetery because of them." He continues,

"...I am also happy that I was able to model for my children exactly how a person should behave after making a monumental mistake. While I would do anything to turn back the clock, alter my actions and spare two women from my frightening behavior, I simply cannot change the past. And it goes on, I ask that you consider me in my actions for the right to be forgotten initiative and that you remove my name and photos from the articles written about me. I'm grateful for this consideration. Thank you. So I got an email from Chris saying that we met and we've been approved and you've been

approved. And he said something like there were mentions and there's really no way to just take out your name. So we're just going gonna take the stories down. Wow. So I talked to Chris about taking all the articles down and he said like, first thing, the case is just so notorious

that taking Seth's name out wouldn't actually allow him to be forgotten. And so it just made more sense to delete all of the articles. The other thing is, it seemed like a case that just kind of fit into the rules that are emerging in these committee meetings. These were misdemeanors. It wasn't violent crime.

It wasn't corruption. It wasn't a celebrity. They thought he seemed apologetic. There had been no other instances. So to them, it seemed like a pretty cut and dry decision. But I, you know, it's still, I still have, it was not the only outlet that the stuff appeared in. So I still have a Google problem. But again, like the records being sealed, like every little step, and every day that passes every bit of time, you leave a mistake in the past and you're one step closer to a new life, a second chance, something better. And this

was a big milestone. I have a question about the women who you expose yourself to. That's Radio Lab producer Annie McEwan. She was in on the interview with Seth. As far as the women go, they're anonymous in all the articles and the records are sealed, but it's their story too. And so at the end of the interview, Annie asked Seth about this. So I'm just trying to put myself in their shoes and if they wake up to somehow discover that the article about their experience was taken down, do you think about that from their perspective? I have. I hope I hope they don't think about it, honestly. I don't know how they think about it.

I don't know. I don't know how they think about it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. They might be upset. But I don't know. I hope they don't think about it. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing.

I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. Thank you, Molly. You're welcome. That piece was reported by Molly Webster and produced by Molly Webster and Bethel Hoppe. We have a few people to thank. Kathy English, David Airdos, Ed Haber, Brewster Colley, Jane Kamensky, and to everyone who shared their story with me. Okay, well, I guess we should go. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Molly Webster.

Thanks for listening. Okay, so that was the show as we aired it back in 2019. And then actually just a couple of days ago, I sat down with Molly to find out about the current status of our journalistic forgetfulness. I'm not really sure where to start, but I guess the thing is, it's been four years, so much has happened in the country. Yeah. Like a pandemic, protests and elections and instructions. Yeah, it felt like a moment to go back to people and say, like, are you still thinking about this? What has changed? Did other people take it on? Are people doing it? Is Chris still

a bit of a pariah in the community for doing it? And so, you know, I recently spoke to Chris and he said that when the peace came out, he just started getting calls all the time from other newsrooms who wanted to have more conversations about the right to be forgotten, how to run it in their newsrooms, like what to do. And so there was like this picking up of steam and then I guess the Boston Globe said that they would start considering unpublishing. And then the AP said that they wouldn't publish names

in stories that were just about initial arrests from minor crimes. And they said, like, if you local news organization choose to put names into just an arrest story, we won't even run it. Interesting. So that probably made a lot of local newsrooms start reporting differently. So it's not just unpublishing us also changing the way people are what they're publishing in the first place. Right, right. And so what Chris said, and then I talked to Deborah Dwyer again, what she was saying is that you sort of in the last four years, what you've seen is this idea of unpublishing become more pervasive throughout news organizations.

And then both Chris and Deborah said that, especially in the last couple of years, following the protests after George Floyd's murder, that newsrooms are thinking a lot more about what they publish, what they're choosing to unpublish, and then how those decisions amplify racial inequalities. So those, yeah. And what about just going back to like Chris and Cleveland.com?

Are they still doing it? What are they up to? Yeah, what are they up to? Are they still doing it? Right, so Chris and his team in 2020 applied for funding from the Google News Initiative to try to take on unpublishing with some sort of programming. Is there a way to just surface things we are interested in unpublishing and then just automatically do it? So no one has to request that we do it. And to try to surface those articles, they came up with this list of key words

that might lead them to articles where they would want to unpublish. Serve up at least a first pass of articles that might. Yes. These are the ones that should be considered. Yeah, should be considered. And then we will narrow down the pool and then get rid of some or unpublish some. So they still have to do this thing they do where they sit around the table and talk about things, right? Yeah, so they actually hired a group of retired editors just for this project. But the first time this program was used, it surfaced like 130,000 articles on their website.

We're suggested as ones that they could pull. Just from cluesand.com. Chris says that this team of editors very quickly came to him and said, you got a narrowed on the list because it's just because we're just bumping into so many articles where we would never unpublish it. And so they tried again, they narrowed the list down about 17,000 articles came back and then Chris and that team of editors went through all 17,000 of those articles. Oh my god, that's still a crazy effort. That's still a ton of articles. All the while they're running a daily news organization.

And so they went through 17,000 articles and then they ultimately decided that 10,000 of them could be unpublished. The other thing that they did was that they did delete 10,000 mug shots that were on their website. I mean, it's just that if I can take a moment because 10,000, I mean, I'm sure this didn't, this scenario didn't come up in all 10,000, but just in Cleveland

that's a lot of cases where a Person is applying for a job or to get into college or about to go on a date and someone's gonna Google them That person would have come across a mug shot or an article that maybe made them look not so good and then That's I don't know like that's that a big, that's a lot of people who are just in a, in a deeply different relationship with the world around them because of this. Success, success, success. And then I talked to Deb Dwyer and she offered me some perspective, which is that right now now the unpublishing conversation largely centers on Google and Google searches.

Now, Chris and his team, when they unpublished something, they totally deleted, but many newsrooms just de-index it, which means that you just can't find it in a Google search, but it's still on the internet. And Deb said that right now what she's starting to think about is what happens when Google's not the main way to search. Or when this thing that we all love called chat GPT comes along. Oh. Or any of chat GPT's cousins and friends just scour the internet. That does not care about a Google search.

That only cares about what's on the internet. It's like maybe we're solving an issue with the tools that we currently have, but it doesn't mean the issue is solved forever. And in fact, forever may be tomorrow, because new tools are at hand. Okay, that's our update. We will be back here, same place, same time, next week with a brand new show. So make sure to check it out. And thanks for listening.

Radio Lab was created by Chad Abemrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lachit Nasir are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Pressler, Rachel Kusik, Aketi Foster Keys, W. Harry Forkthuna, David Gabel, Maria Pazgothiades, Sinden Yamasam Bandung, Matt Kielte, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Sara Kauri, Anna Vaskuhitbaz, Sarah Sandback, Neeson, Sara Kory, Anna Vaskud, Buzz, Sarah Sandbach, Erin Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from such a Kedijima Mokki.

Our fact-truckers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Beth from San Francisco. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. you