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Probably this one of the hardest things for a blogger to face is the request for a takedown of original work, where no one is getting hurt. You were simply reporting the facts, with plenty of cross-links to point to those facts.

Every great once in a while I will get a request to take down something I wrote, mostly because they can ask, and I can chose to pull it down or give them a reason as to why I won’t pull something down. Every time something like this happens, there is a certain amount of soul searching on my part. Usually when I blog I really just try to report the facts, or the things that have worked for me. I really do my best to keep bias out of what I write on line.

I am usually successful, other times I am not, and I know this. Nevertheless, when I am asked to take down a factually correct article that has my biases clearly identified as “In my opinion” I really have to think about it. Is anyone unnecessarily getting their reputation hurt, was this a meme of the day article, is it factual, or as factual as the sources I chose to use when putting together an article. Did something change that makes the article more or less false because steps were taken to fix an issue that I talked about? That is the thinking process here, what is to be gained by removing the article, changing the article, and what is lost if I remove or change the article.

I am generally very careful what I write about, I really do try to get my facts right. We have seen enough hatchet jobs in blogging that as a blogger, I really try to do this right and serve the community. Which is why being asked to take something down is problematic for me. Especially when the issue is public, there are hundreds of articles about it, or hundreds of people have seen the same thing. It is not like I am out there inventing stories, I usually comment on things that are public, well known, or have the potential to be well known.

Given that, I have a request for a takedown for something I wrote, they would like me to simply make the article disappear. The problem is that it was well publicized across many other news sources, and even hit techmeme. There is no way to make the whole thing disappear across the internet, too many people saw it, too many knew about it, too many people commented on it. There is no compelling reason for me to take this down other than generating “good will” with the people in question.

The question I have is would you do? Right now I am not inclined to take it down, the reason is that it really was something we all commented about, no one is getting needlessly hurt by the posting, I am on Google page 20 for the posting, it was factual at the time although circumstances have since changed and the person in question cleared what the issue was about. There is no compelling reason for me to take it down, and these are the hardest kinds of takedowns that bloggers will sometimes face.