Remove news articles from the internet
By Yair Cohen, Solicitor specialising in the right to be forgotten
News organisations rarely take an article down just because someone asks. In many cases, though, the law is on your side. If a news article about you is old, inaccurate, misleading or no longer in the public interest, you may have a legal right to have it removed from the internet, at its source, and not merely hidden from search results. Our solicitors have been securing the removal of news articles for clients for over two decades, from national newspaper websites, local news sites, and the aggregators and copycat sites that republish them.
This article explains where that right comes from, how the removal process works step by step, what it is likely to cost, what happens when a publisher refuses, and the results you can realistically expect.
Can a news article really be removed from the internet?
Yes, in many cases it can, although no lawyer can promise removal in every case. The starting point is that personal data about you, and a news article about you is exactly that, is protected by data protection law. When the reasons for publishing the article have faded with time, your right to privacy and to be left alone can outweigh the publisher's reasons for keeping it online. That is the principle people call the right to be forgotten.
There are two separate targets, and it helps to keep them apart from the start. The first is the article itself, on the newspaper's website. The second is the search results that point to it. This article deals with removal at source, taking the article down where it lives. If your priority is stopping the article appearing when someone searches your name on Google, you may also want to remove an article from Google search, which is a separate process with its own legal tests. In our experience the two routes work best when they are planned together.
The law that makes removal possible
The right to erasure is set out in Article 17 of the UK GDPR. It gives you the right to ask for personal data about you to be erased where, among other grounds, the data is no longer necessary for the purpose it was published, or the processing is unlawful.
The Data Protection Act 2018 applies the UK GDPR and contains the exemptions that publishers rely on, including the special-purposes journalism exemption. That exemption is why a newspaper can lawfully report about you in the first place. It is not unlimited, and it weakens as the story ages.
The right to be forgotten itself was established in Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González (C-131/12). The leading English case is NT1 and NT2 v Google LLC [2018] EWHC 799 (QB), in which the High Court ordered the delisting of old conviction reports for one of the two claimants. The court's reasoning about spent convictions, rehabilitation and the passage of time is the foundation of most of the arguments we make today.
Where the article reports a conviction, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 matters as well. Once a conviction is spent, the law treats you as rehabilitated, and continuing publication becomes much harder for a publisher to justify.
Data protection is only part of the picture. In many cases the more powerful right is not the right to be forgotten at all, but the common law right to privacy, which lawyers call misuse of private information. The courts developed it in Campbell v MGN Ltd [2004] UKHL 22, and it protects any information over which you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
It can be the stronger route for three reasons. First, the journalism exemption that publishers lean on under the Data Protection Act 2018 does not decide a privacy claim; the court weighs your privacy directly against the publisher's freedom of expression, and an old story about a private person carries little weight on the publisher's side of the scales. Second, the Supreme Court confirmed in Bloomberg LP v ZXC [2022] UKSC 5 that a person under criminal investigation ordinarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy in that fact before charge, which is exactly the territory many old news stories occupy. Third, a privacy claim can support an injunction and damages, not only erasure, which changes the conversation with a publisher considerably.
In practice we usually put the two together, the right to be forgotten under data protection law and the common law right to privacy, each reinforcing the other.
An old news story does not stop being personal data because it was once news. Time changes the legal balance, and the law recognises that.
How to remove a news article from the internet, step by step
Each case is different, but a properly conducted removal usually follows the same path.
Step one: the legal assessment. Before anything is sent to anyone, the article is assessed against the legal grounds: is the story out of date, inaccurate, excessive, or about a spent conviction, and what public interest, if any, still attaches to it. This matters because a request to a publisher commits you to a factual position, which is why a specialist should draft it. We offer this assessment free of charge.
Step two: the request to the publisher. A formal erasure request goes to the newspaper or website, setting out the legal basis under Article 17 UK GDPR and the reasons the journalism exemption no longer protects the article. Publishers normally respond within about a month, which is the response period data protection law expects.
Step three: the sources behind the story. Where the article came from a police or Crown Prosecution Service press release, the request usually needs to reach them too, so the original justification for the publicity is formally withdrawn. Without this step, a removed article can resurface.
Step four: the copies. News articles are syndicated, scraped and quoted. Copycat sites and news aggregators each need their own removal request. Doing the job properly means finding every copy, and this is where much of the practical work sits.
Step five: if the publisher refuses. The options include a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office, which is free but not always the right move, and court proceedings for erasure as the backstop. In parallel, a delisting application to Google can take the article out of name-search results even while it stays on the publisher's site.
How long it takes and what it costs
In our experience, straightforward removals, where a publisher accepts the request, tend to conclude within a few weeks to a couple of months, driven mainly by the publisher's response time. Cases that need the ICO or court, or that involve many copies of the story, take longer, sometimes several months.
Costs depend on the number of publications involved and whether the matter resolves at the request stage. In most cases we act on a fixed fee, agreed with you in advance, which depends on the complexity of the case and the number of publications involved. The initial expert assessment of your case is free, and you will know where you stand before committing to anything.
What happens if the newspaper refuses
A refusal is not the end. Publishers usually rely on the journalism exemption and the public interest. Both weaken with time, and neither automatically covers a story about a private individual whose situation has changed, for example where charges were dropped, the person was acquitted, or the conviction is spent.
When a refusal comes, there are usually three options. The first is a complaint to the ICO, which can find that continued publication breaches data protection law. We do not always recommend that route, because in some cases an ICO complaint can cause more harm than good, and we advise on it case by case. The second is delisting: even where the article stays up, Google can be required to stop returning it for searches of your name, which for most people removes nearly all of the day-to-day harm. The third is court proceedings for erasure, which is the backstop rather than the starting point, and the position NT1 and NT2 established makes the prospects in spent-conviction cases far better than most people assume.
What outcome can you realistically expect?
The realistic outcome depends mostly on the type of story. In our experience, the strongest cases involve spent convictions, reports of arrests or charges that never led to conviction, acquittals, and old stories about private individuals with no continuing public role. In those cases full removal at source is achievable in many cases, and delisting from name searches in more still.
The harder cases involve recent reporting, stories with a continuing public interest, and people in public roles to which the story remains relevant. In those cases removal at source may not be available, and the realistic goal becomes delisting, updating or anonymising the article rather than deleting it.
The measure of success that matters is what a stranger finds when they search your name. Complete deletion everywhere is not always possible, but ending the article's presence in your name searches usually is.
Examples from our own cases
These accounts from matters we have acted in show how the process works in practice. Identifying details in each are changed for privacy.
- Right to be forgotten newspaper articles of criminal conviction: removing old conviction reporting from the internet and from name searches.
- Removing news reports of a court case: reports of criminal proceedings and protecting a victim's privacy.
- Removing outdated news articles about possession of indecent images: a spent conviction in the most sensitive category of case.
Finishing the job properly
Removing the main article is rarely the whole job. Google's autocomplete can keep suggesting the story next to your name, images from the article can survive in image search, and cached copies and quoting pages can linger. A proper clean-up deals with the autosuggestions, the images and the referring pages together, so the story does not resurface a few months later. If you leave traces, they tend to grow back.
Frequently asked questions
Can I force a newspaper to delete an article about me?
Not directly, and no one can. What you can do is put the publisher under a legal duty to justify continued publication under Article 17 UK GDPR, complain to the ICO if they refuse, and ask the court to order erasure as the backstop. In practice, in our experience a well-founded legal request resolves many cases without going that far.
Does removing the article at source also remove it from Google?
Removal at source usually leads to the search result disappearing once Google recrawls the page, although this can lag by days or weeks. The reverse is not true: delisting from Google leaves the article live on the publisher's website. That is why the two routes are usually planned together.
What if the article is true?
Truth does not defeat the right to erasure. The right to be forgotten is about whether continued publication of accurate, lawful reporting remains justified years later, and Google Spain established that it may not be. Inaccuracy adds further grounds, but it is not required.
The story is about my spent conviction. Does that help?
Considerably. Once a conviction is spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, the law treats you as rehabilitated, and the reasoning in NT1 and NT2 makes continuing publication and listing much harder to defend.
Do I need to contact every website that copied the story?
Each copy usually needs its own request, because each publisher makes its own decision. Part of what we do is find every copy, including aggregators and scraper sites, and deal with them in one coordinated exercise.
How long does the whole process take?
Publisher-stage removals usually conclude within weeks to a couple of months. Cases that go to the ICO, or that involve many copies, can take several months. You should see progress in stages rather than in one moment.
If a news article is following you around the internet, you do not have to live with it. Tell us about the article and we will assess your legal position, free of charge and in confidence.
