The Right To Be Forgotten: how I found Griveaux's video

Hi there, bonjour! I'd like to talk about an interesting experience I had whilst surfing the net (LOL, to put it mildly) this weekend. So many of you will know that I had been away in northern Greece for a week, I tend not to spend much time looking at the news when I am busy sightseeing compared to when I am back at home. So one of the major stories last week was from France when French politician Benjamin Griveaux was forced to drop out of the race to be Paris' next mayor after contents of an exchange of messages that Griveaux had with a young woman was leaked onto the internet. This was scandalous because Griveaux ran on a platform of family values and was married with three children, but in private he was messaging a young woman and sent her a video of his private parts. Okay, so naturally when I read the story I got curious and out of morbid curiousity, I wanted to see the video in question - mind you, I had only really took interest in the story well over 3 days after in happened because I had been traveling in Greece, but when I tried to look for the video, it was gone. All searches on Google and other major search engines came up with nothing, even though I searched in both French and English but to no avail. Then of course, I realized that Griveaux was an ally of the French president Emmanuel Macron and thus had powerful people in the French government to ask for the 'right to be forgotten'.

So here's the Wikipedia definition of this law: The right to be forgotten is the right to have negative private information about a person to be removed from Internet searches and other directories under some circumstances. The concept that has been discussed and put into practice both in the European Union (EU) and, since 2006, in Argentina. The issue has arisen from desires of individuals to "determine the development of their life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past." We are so used to finding information via search engines and what this means is that even if that sex video of Griveaux is somewhere on the internet, my search engine will refuse to find it for me and will either tell me that there were no matches found, or in most cases, simply direct me to a BBC or CNN report on the case rather than the salacious sex video in question. Given that the interest in this story was mostly in France and to some degree, in other European countries, it mostly fell under the jurisdiction of EU law and so the French government was able to use it to wipe this video of the internet. It seems that it did spread like wildfire across many social media platforms within hours of it first appearing on a website run by Russian dissident artist Pyotr Pavelensky. But even if someone did retweet the original contents of this sex video in question, if you tried doing a search for it on Twitter now, you would not be able to locate it. This is interesting because there's plenty of porn on Twitter - they don't have a problem with adult content. But when it comes to 'the right to be forgotten', then if there are tweets carrying this sex video, it's not like it has been deleted; rather, it will no longer be searchable. So if you no longer can locate it via a search, you can't see it now even if it exists on some website out there.

This is pretty stunning to me of course because I think that governments could use this to censor the internet - say someone does a Wikileaks style expose about something very illegal that some famous politician has committed, would the powerful politician be able to use this law in order to protect themselves? The fact is Griveaux doesn't deny that it was him in the sex video (you can't see his face in the video) - he hurriedly quit the election as an admission of guilt. So we do know that he was either having an affair outside his marriage whilst masquerading as a family man and father of three to the public, or he was at least indulging in some rather inappropriate exchange of messages with a young lady who is not his wife. I don't see how erasing this sex video from the internet is going to change anything - this story has already made the news headlines around the world and there have been numerous memes circulating on the internet about Griveaux. The best one that left me roaring with laughing was a pun on his campaign slogan, "Paris m'habite" (Paris lives in me). This has been changed to "Paris ma bite" (Paris my penis). This pun works especially well in French since m'habite and ma bite are homophones - they are spelled differently and mean very different things, but when spoken out aloud, they sound exactly the same. Nobody in the French government is denying the allegations against Griveaux in any case, he is hardly the first French politician to have had an affair. Numerous French presidents have been routinely unfaithful to their wives: from Hollande to Mitterand to Faure, in fact when it was revealed that Hollande was having an affair, it didn't hurt his approval ratings at all as president, in fact his ratings went up as his mistress was a smoking hot French actress. So why have they chosen to use this law to wipe this sex video off the internet? It's not like the French public are prudish about sex or infidelity anyway - the French do have a booming adult entertainment industry.

Here's the thing though: Griveaux is a rich politician with very powerful connections in France, he has the resources to take advantage of this law and wipe this video off the internet if he chooses to. What about cases where ordinary people become victims of 'revenge porn'? These ordinary folks certainly don't have the resources to force the hand of Google and all the other search engines of the world to take a similar kind of action if their privacy has been violated like that. Certainly, if an ordinary person approaches Google with a request like that, without the backing of a team of highly paid lawyers and some government connections, I doubt a company like Google would even take such a request seriously. Such a person would then have no choice but to go to court over something like that, but in so doing would risk the Streisand effect whereby even more people end up seeing the video in question. So to some degree, yes Griveaux has avoided the Streisand effect because those who wish to see this video can no longer (easily) find it. Often in the cases of revenge porn, many victims of revenge porn would simply want the video in question to be wiped off the internet - they really have no desire to go through an arduous long court case and legal process but at the same time, they don't have the financial resources to force the hand of the world's most powerful search engine to give their case any kind of priority. Perhaps this is the harsh reality of the world as reflected in the popular Korean film 'Parasite' that everyone is talking about now: the rich have privileges that the rest of us ordinary folks can only dream about. This law is one of them: it exists on paper and in principle but you need to be rich and powerful like Benjamin Griveaux if you want it to protect you.

I was determined to see this sex video: I realized that the 'right to be forgotten' only applies in the EU, I did a search for the video in Russian. Pavelensky is after all from Russia and Russia is outside the EU, they really don't give a shit what the French government doesn't want you to see on this occasion. Now I am still searching for this from a computer in London, so even if the video is on some Russian website, I was wondering if the search engines would still be able to somehow realize what I am looking for even if I was searching in Russian instead of English or French. And after all, I do speak Russian - it is not as fluent as my French but it is passable. Initial searches yielded nothing - then I did the following: Griveaux is pronounced "Grivo", so I improvised and did a search instead for Гриво rather than Гривеаюх. The former would have been a more accurate phonetic translation whilst the latter would be more faithful to the original spelling in French (but would be pronounced more like Griveayuch in Russian). Then I added a few words in Russian that I do know describing exactly what Griveaux was doing in the video and sure enough, it lead to a Russian website where I got to finally see what I had been looking for. Not that I am encouraging you to do what I did but let's just say I was thoroughly underwhelmed - I was neither impressed nor entertained by what I saw. You know, after all the effort I had gone through to find that video on a Russian website, I had built up a lot of expectations that were clearly unrealistic when I finally saw the video. It was not like Griveaux even showed his face in the video, so I was left wondering what all the fuss was about. Let's just say that based on that video, Griveaux isn't leaving politics for the world of porn anytime soon. So much for 'the right to be forgotten', it wasn't that hard to find the censored content at the end of the day if you simply searched for the content in Russian. After all, it is not like I'm a super IT expert - I just happen to speak Russian.

I think Griveaux is a hypocrite - the matters of his personal life are none of my concern, but he was trying to stand on a platform of family values, depicting himself as a wholesome family man with three children to the voters whilst screwing around behind his wife's back, well no, I don't like that. That is the very essence of hypocrisy. Furthermore, when he pulled out of the race to be Paris' next mayor, he claimed that this was an attack on his family - in his statement, he said, "My family doesn't deserve this. I'm not prepared to expose my family and myself any more when all these attacks are allowed. This goes too far." Hello? Seriously? Are you living on another planet? He was the unfaithful husband screwing around, having an affair and he made it sound as if the attack was on his wife and children? Why because they now realize what a scumbag hypocrite you are? That's just utter bullshit, he was the one who betrayed his wife in the first place and he is the villain here, not the victim. This is why so many people on social media were sharing the sex video online - not so much because the content of the video is anything to write home about but rather because we are all disgusted by his sheer hypocrisy. Like I said before, what Griveaux does in his personal life is none of my business but when he tries to get people to vote for him based on a lie that he is a wholesome family man, then he's just asking for trouble. That's not the kind of game you want to play when you are a politician and your entire private life is up for scrutiny on the internet. Politics is the ultimate popularity contest - such is the very essence of democracy: you need to be popular to win enough votes to gain power as a politician. It is shocking that even someone like Griveaux has failed to understand how this game works and you'd think that he would understand this after having been in politics for this long.

So what do you think? How should the 'right to be forgotten' be applied in practice? Should it be a law only for the rich and powerful? Are you surprised that someone like Griveaux can simply make a video like that seemingly disappear from the internet after it has been shared so much on social media? And should I be using my ability to speak both French and Russian in a more useful manner? Are you surprised at how easy it was for me to eventually find the video in question by simply doing a search in Russian? What do you think about the whole Griveaux affair then? Has Griveaux been treated fairly by the media? Leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading. Merci beaucoup et спасибо большое!