An independent Australian journal · Melbourne
The Australian journal of takedowns, de-indexing and digital reputation
Google will not unpublish a page for you. It will, in defined cases, de-index a URL, drop a snippet, or honour a court order. This is the Australian map of those forms, and of the work you still have to do at the source.
Google is not the only drawer. Bing still feeds DuckDuckGo, Brave runs its own index, Yandex and leftover Apple Spotlight cards keep serving URLs that a successful Google removal never touched.
The Australian name-search problem often starts as a phone-book row or an old roll line that was never a social post. Sensis remnants, historical electoral products and scraped PDFs still feed people-search clones.
Google’s AI Overview is a summary of pages the index can still see. Chatbots add their own training set on top. Neither product unpublished the source, and a thin digital profile is how one old article becomes the whole answer.
Image, safety and impersonation
Footage that includes a child is not an ordinary takedown. Australian law, eSafety’s child schemes, ACORN and the platform child-sexual-abuse reports exist so that the file is not treated as a reputation job. Do not circulate it to help.
Copyright protects original expression you own, not a story about you. Filing a false copyright claim to sink a review or a news article is the wrong shortcut, and it is a risky one. Here is when the tool is honest — and when it is not.
Most Australian newsrooms will correct a mistake. Almost none will unpublish an accurate story because you have moved on. The live work is the correction, the right of reply, and the Google leftover.
Statute, not slogans
Defamation after the 2021 reforms, the Online Safety Act, the Privacy Act and copyright — what Australian law can actually make a publisher, platform or search engine do.
Photograph: Bidgee. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. See all image credits.
The urgent desk
Deepfakes, non-consensual intimate images, fake profiles, doxxing and anything involving a child — the Australian pathways that should be used first, and in the right order.
Photograph: User:דולב. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. See all image credits.
Report buttons and the policy behind them
How Australians actually get posts, profiles, videos and reviews taken down on Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and the rest — and where the report button simply will not go.
Photograph: MerveillePédia. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. See all image credits.
The copies that were never a post
People-search sites, court lists, AustLII, ASIC, ABN Lookup, news archives and the old White Pages — public records and commercial scrapes that outlive any social post.
Photograph: Pru.mitchell. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. See all image credits.
After the page is gone
De-indexing, caches, sitelinks, Knowledge Panels, AI Overviews and the Wayback Machine — the places a takedown goes to die, or to live forever.
Photograph: Victorgrigas. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. See all image credits.