What is known

Thanks to the Digital Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), Google allows users to remove certain content from their searches. So, for example, creators of movies, music or books can request that links to sites with pirated content be removed from the search. However, citing a Russian source who conducted an investigation on this issue, Oboz.ua writes that Russian public relations personnel, consisting of high-ranking officials and businessmen, found a way to deceive the system.

It works as follows:

• First, an investigation about specific crimes published on one of the sites is copied to another newly created site.
• Here the material is published under a different date that precedes the date that appears in the original source’s material.
• In this way, everything looks as if the news on the fake site was first published, and it is claimed that the original news was copied without any changes, which means it violates copyright.
• After that, Google receives a plagiarism complaint and a request to no longer display links to the original article.
• Once the request is met, the copy of the article will be deleted. Thus, the original article is hidden from everyone and the copy disappears.
• It is also noteworthy that in this scheme, the names of the real authors who published the research are sometimes used. They write a petition of objection to Google on their behalf.

The investigation claims that at least a few investigations were removed this way. For example, the material about the head of Rosgvardia Viktor Zolotov, who spent a luxurious vacation in the Seychelles “in the company of friends, generals and young women.” Moreover, even materials from publications such as “Mediazona”, “The Insider” and “Kasparov.ru” referring only to this investigation were removed from the search results.

By this method, the investigation into the leadership of the LDPR party, in which Zhirynovsky’s son and his ex-wife took part, was also removed.

In general, a database recording all these complaints was found 1,600+ examples requiring removal of links to articles. However, it is not known how many of them are satisfied. Using a manual Google search, the researchers checked only a few of them but were unable to find all 1,600.