Is Taking Things off Google Censorship?

There's a brouhaha at the Seattle Pacific University student newspaper over a request to take an article from 1998 off their website. 33-year-old Ethiopian immigrant Shakespear Feyissa, now a lawyer, is pressuring the school and the paper, The Falcon, to remove an article which discussed a dropped sexual assault charge against him and his indefinite suspension from the school. At the time, Feyissa wanted his story to be heard. Years later, it became one of the top results on Google for his name.

I agree with the school paper on the matter. You can't force them to take the article off the web, as they have the rights to everything they publish. There's no way I would have agreed to this when I was an editor at my college newspaper. But is adding robots.txt censorship? It's an interesting question ask whether taking something off Google but not the web counts as censorship. I don't think it does, but it may constitute that in a few years. It raises some interesting legal questions about how important Google is to accessing information in today's world, and whether a governing body (or in this case, school administration) is prohibited from forcing the press to take something off Google but not the web.

Of course, now the point is moot. Because of the coverage of the controversy, the article is nowhere to be found on the Google results for "Shakespear Feyissa," But the stories on the controversy are all over the place. Not exactly the best SEO strategy if you're trying to remove a rape allegation from Google.

(via Romenesko)