At its discretion, The Associated Press considers requests to block old stories, photos and video about minor crimes from APNews.com and other public-facing AP sites, making them no longer accessible. In those cases, the AP would also request that Google “deindex” the stories, removing them from its search results.
The goal is to prevent old accusations in minor crime stories with no current news value from causing harm long after the accused was cleared, charges were dropped or convictions expunged.
Because eliding the historical record is also a competing concern for a news organization, such stories would continue to be part of the AP’s internal archive and on sites such as LexisNexis that make AP content available to their paid subscribers.
Any decision will affect only AP sites. Someone interested in removing an AP story from an AP customer’s site must contact that customer.
Our form to submit requests, and details on the criteria we use to consider those requests, are below.