The Right for Freedom to Be Forgotten

by Dave Blount | March 17, 2017 10:47 am

The latest assault on free speech on the Internet comes not from Iran or China but the People’s Republic of New York, where Assemblyman David Weprin has introduced a bill securing the “right to be forgotten.” From the bill:

Right to be forgotten act. 1. Upon the request from an individual, all search engines, indexers, publishers and any other persons or entities that make available, on or through the internet or other widely used computer-based network, program or service, information about the requester, shall remove information, articles, identifying information and other content about such individual, and links or indexes to any of the same, that is “inaccurate”, “irrelevant”, “inadequate” or “excessive” within thirty days of such request, and without replacing such removed information, article or content with any disclaimer, takedown notice, hyperlink, or other replacement notice, information or content, or cooperating with any other person or entity who does any of the foregoing. For purposes of this section, “inaccurate”, “irrelevant”, “inadequate”, or “excessive” shall mean content, which after a significant lapse in time from its first publication, is no longer material to current public debate or discourse…

The punishment is $250 per day, paid to the person who wants to be “forgotten,” plus lawyer fees.

Imagine trying to run a website that disseminates information if anyone for essentially any reason can demand that you make references to them disappear.

Yet again we see that when leftists bark about upholding some new “right” that no one ever thought of before, what they are doing is attacking actual rights of the sort that are upheld in the Constitution. As Eugene Volokh puts it,

There is no “right to be forgotten” in the abstract; no law can ensure that, and no law can be limited to that. Instead, the “right” this aims to protect is the power to suppress speech — the power to force people (on pain of financial ruin) to stop talking about other people, when some government body decides that they should stop.

Like much of the Left’s agenda, it is tyranny poorly disguised by an idiot’s conception of rights.

Internet Censorship

On a tip from Sean C. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/freedom/right-freedom-forgotten/