No one likes to have an unflattering photo of themselves on the internet. Perhaps you could have had a bad hair day, or maybe a friend decided to shoot a photo from an unfortunate angle. Regardless, it's just a photo, right? You can always ask your friend to take it down, and everyone else will be none the wiser.
Now imagine that rather than asking a friend to remove a photo of you, you were instead a corporation asking a news site to remove an article about you. In that case, having information about yourself removed is a bit more challenging, both logistically and ethically. In NeimanLab's Predictions for Journalism 2022, Melody Kramer predicts, "Deborah Dwyer’s research on unpublishing the news will become even more relevant as more mergers take place (and hedge funds try to delete previous stories written about them)." These attempts at "unpublishing" the news could become a huge hurdle for journalistic integrity and journalism as a whole going forward. Of course, this sentiment is not lost on Deborah Dwyer, the driving force behind unpublishingthenews.com. According to Dwyer, "In total, the issues present sticky ethical dilemmas for traditional journalists who have traditionally identified as custodians of an important public record — in journalism lingo, 'the first draft of history.'”
You can find more information on unpublishing at https://unpublishingthenews.com/what-is-unpublishing/
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