One Brother Stabbed the Other. The Journalist Who Wrote About It Paid a Price. (original) (raw)

Technology|One Brother Stabbed the Other. The Journalist Who Wrote About It Paid a Price.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/technology/right-to-be-forgotten-law-europe.html

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The use of Europe’s “right to be forgotten” privacy law has broadened, illustrated by two Italian brothers, a stabbing and the journalist who wrote about them.

“Nobody will ever convince me that a law forcing you to delete truthful news can exist,” said Alessandro Biancardi, who edited the news site PrimaDaNoi, with his wife, Alessandra Lotti, at the courthouse in Pescara, Italy.Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Sept. 23, 2019

PESCARA, Italy — Alessandro Biancardi, a journalist in the Italian coastal city of Pescara, knew he had a hot story for his small news website. Two brothers in their 70s had argued at a seaside restaurant, the police told him, and one had stabbed the other with a fish knife.

Mr. Biancardi tapped out details of the brawl. The midafternoon fracas had started over money, he wrote, leading to nonfatal injuries and the arrests of the brothers and other family members. Then he pressed publish.

That was March 2008. What Mr. Biancardi could not have known was that a decade later, the stabbing story would leave him unemployed and put him at the center of a debate over the internet’s future andthe growing reach of Europe’s “right to be forgotten” privacy rule.

Two and a half years after the stabbing story was published, one of the brothers demanded that it be deleted online because it damaged his reputation. Mr. Biancardi refused, citing the public’s right to know. That set in motion a legal drama that foreshadows future battles over how speech and privacy on the internet should be regulated, and by whom.

“Nobody will ever convince me that a law forcing you to delete truthful news can exist,” said Mr. Biancardi, 47, seated in the living room of his Pescara apartment this month.

A cornerstone of European privacy regulations, the right to be forgotten lets citizens request that a company or website take down material considered old, irrelevant, inaccurate or excessive. The concept dates to at least the 1990s and countries apply it differently, but it gained prominence when the European Union’s top court said in 2014 that it could be used to force Google to delist material from its search engine results.

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