Investigative report on reputation management highlights continued abuse of copyright and other laws to manipulate online media
Earlier this week, on February 17 2023, an investigative news report about Eliminalia, a Spanish reputation management firm made headlines. The leaked documents in the report revealed that Eliminalia “worked for scammers, spyware companies, torturers, convicted criminals and others in the global underworld to hide public-interest information” under the guise of being a service that claimed “to remove unwanted and erroneous information” for clients.
The report was authored in partnership by Phineas Rueckert of Forbidden Stories, Shawn Boburg of Washington Post, Kira Zalan and Lila Saul Rodriguez of Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, David Pegg of The Guardian and Lorenzo Bagnoli of Investigative Reporting Project Italy. Through dozens of interviews with former employees, clients and victims, the authors investigated how Eliminalia manipulated online service providers, weaponized copyright law, and in some cases, threatened and abused journalists, with the aim of removing legitimate news articles from the internet.
In the past, Rest of World and Qurium have also reported such malpractices by Eliminalia. This report, however, provides an expansive set of internal data from Eliminalia,, detailing various ways in which Eliminalia resorts to media manipulation for reputation management of rich and powerful individuals.
The Forbidden Stories report provides examples of how journalists have received layered threats to remove legitimate news articles, threats that have taken the shape of either takedown requests using copyright law as the basis for removal, or legal letters claiming European data protection laws as the basis for removal , and sometimes both. In addition to revealing new details about sending fraudulent removal requests based on data protection and copyright, the leaked documents also exposed that Eliminalia created artificial traffic to boost falsely created google search results and in turn, effectively hide real search results. With such techniques, per the report, Eliminalia had successfully built a large-scale business, with a presence in fifty countries across five continents. The piece notes, ironically, that in the follow up to the publication, Eliminalia appears to have in a sense eliminated itself, and renamed itself “Idata Protection.”
Although this corpus of internal documents reveals many new details, the full extent of what companies like Eliminalia and other similar actors in this space are doing remains unclear. More comprehensive and carefully designed transparency efforts could potentially provide clearer insights into the kind of information that is being manipulated online, by whom and to protect whose reputation. Currently, some online platforms share takedown requests with the Lumen database voluntarily, which can catalyze journalist’s and public interest researcher's understanding of how the online takedown ecosystem is abused for content removal. The new Digital Services Act in Europe presents another opportunity for transparency by mandating important disclosures regarding content removal in a variety of contexts, including algorithmic decision making. Regardless, the Forbidden Stories report, and others like it, heighten the need for greater transparency from online service providers, if only so that such fraudulent takedown notices may be identified after the fact, allowing scholars, journalists, policy makers and the recipient online platforms themselves to take appropriate action.