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posted by martyb on Saturday September 02 2017, @02:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-be-evil dept.

Following a controversy over Google's Eric Schmidt pressuring the New America Foundation into removing a critical blog post and firing the scholar who wrote it, a former Forbes journalist now working at Gizmodo has written about an incident in which Google allegedly pressured Forbes to kill a negative story:

The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.

Hill thought that seemed like a big story, so she contacted Google's PR shop for confirmation. Google essentially confirmed the story, and so Hill ran with it under the headline: "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers."

Hill described what happened next:

Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.)

It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.

If true, does it reflect worse on Google or the clickbait and scriptwall outlet Forbes?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 02 2017, @03:41PM (2 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday September 02 2017, @03:41PM (#562944) Journal

    And no one is ever unfairly pressured into agreeing to an NDA. Employers never abuse their power to strongarm candidates into accepting unconscionable and even illegal restrictions on their rights and freedoms.

    Sign, or starve.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by unauthorized on Saturday September 02 2017, @04:06PM (1 child)

    by unauthorized (3776) on Saturday September 02 2017, @04:06PM (#562953)

    In that case, Forbes should have fought in court to get the NDA repelled instead of blatantly ignoring the legally binding agreement they allegedly entered. You don't get a free pass on violating contracts by screaming "injustice" loud enough.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @07:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @07:41PM (#562993)

      Some contracts should not even be enforceable, such as NDAs. I have no problem with people violating them.