Book Project - The Right to be Forgotten Decade

This book is based on a significant mixed methods approach: it draws from an open web mapping and content analysis of over 800 sources and 5000 texts, collected and analyzed between 2015 and 2018. It also draws from in-depth interviews within newsrooms, activist circles, and platform councils across three continents. Each chapter of The Right to be Forgotten Decade recounts how the Right to be Forgotten was variously defined in each of these arenas: a kiss of death to journalistic autonomy, a ray of hope for revenge porn victims, the latest in colonial incursions in Latin America, and/or an attack on sovereignty and innovation according to platform companies. This book illustrates how there is lasting power in defining, and the exercise of this power is a multi-sited and complicated thing—especially in the context of changing media technologies.

This book project is based my doctoral research, conducted at the University of Cambridge under Prof. Ella McPherson. This dissertation was recognized by Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in the 2022 Dissertation Award Scheme. The award committed described it as “a very timely study on internet governance, user data processing and control. The study is particularly interesting as it looks at the right to be forgotten as an “activist” tool for marginalized groups but also on the other hand how it serves as an exclusionary measure. The dissertation thus not only deals with many issues important in internet scholarship but has implications for policy debates along the North-South divide.”

Some of the findings have already been published in New Media and Society.