Google takedown example

Google's Content Removal System: An Ongoing Vulnerability

Investigation reveals how legitimate journalism continues to be hidden from search results through fraudulent DMCA notices

By Marco Dalla Stella

When searching for South African businessman Poovandaren Chetty on Google, you'll find mostly positive articles. You'll also encounter a peculiar message:


"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at LumenDatabase.org."


This message indicates that content was removed from search results due to a copyright claim. The alleged copyright holder filed a complaint with Google, claiming the content was plagiarized, leading to its removal.


However, investigation of the complaint reveals its likely fraudulent nature. The takedown request came from an anonymous Tumblr blog, targeting content from a reputable South African news outlet.


This represents a persistent tactic employed by questionable reputation management companies to sanitize their clients' online presence. These companies create blogs with copied content, backdate the posts, then claim the original news articles are plagiarized copies. Remarkably, Google continues to fall victim to this scheme.

Filing copyright infringement claims with Google has become a common practice for content owners protecting their material online. Since 2011, Google has processed over 19 million takedown requests, with numbers steadily increasing.

However, submitting a takedown request doesn't guarantee content removal. Google states it carefully evaluates each request's legitimacy through both automated and human review processes.


These removal requests have led to more than four billion pages being removed from Google's search results. The peak occurred in 2016, with nearly one billion links removed in a single year. Since then, removals have stabilized between 200 and 300 million annually, despite increasing requests. The reason for this sudden decrease remains unclear.

Truthful, accurate journalism is being hidden from readers.

In what goes of 2023, Google has already received more than two million takedown requests for copyright infringment. Among those that were successful - meaning that resulted in at least one result removed from the platform - more than twenty thousands originated from blogging platforms, mostly from the Google-owned blogpost.


We isolated successful removal requests for 2023 that were made by a blogging platform. It has been reported in the past that shady reputation management companies utilizes these platforms to mantain anonimity while trying to get rid of contents on behalf of their clients.

A lot of those false DMCAs have seemingly the same origin. In this representation, we see the DMCAs flied by 11 websites. The fact that those websites targeted the same pages seems to indicate they were orchestrated by one unique actor.

a network of interconnected false DMCAs

To see the details of those removals, we used the Lumen database, a project of the Harvard University that collects takedown requests coming from Google.


From the data provided, we can clearly see that in 2023 Google removed a number of articles that should probably not have removed. Here below a selection of the most notable cases.