Clean Slate for Petty Crime?
Therese Bottomly, a newspaper editor, recently reached out to HEC via the newspaper The Guardian to ask an important ethical question that our experts are qualified to answer:
The Portland-based Oregonian once had community reporters in bureaus in surrounding suburbs who would cover hyperlocal news, including very trivial offenses, said Therese Bottomly, the paper’s editor. “Is that something that should really haunt somebody for years and years?” she questioned. Recognizing these were minor offenses the paper no longer covered, she formally launched a clean slate program in 2021, establishing an internal committee to review requests.
According to the article, the clean slate policy allows the newspaper to go back and remove people’s names from newspaper articles about crimes they committed if the crime happened more than four years ago and was minor. This is supposed to help criminals in moving on from their past lives.
To Therese’s question: We agree about the idea that something you did as a youngster shouldn’t haunt you for years and years. In fact, in Therese’s clean slate program we can recognize echoes of the well-known legal principle known as the legal principle against double jeopardy. That says that you can’t be punished twice for the same crime. Criminals whose accomplishments on the street are documented in the newspaper are typically arrested, tried, and convicted for it, and thus have already been dealt their due punishment by the legal process that we already have as a society in place for that. Also, destroying their ability to find a good job and romantic partner because Google turns up nasty stories from before they had rethought their ways is kind of like asking them to serve a second legal sentence, only outside the legal system. That’s bad.
But here at HEC, we never just answer the ethics question on its surface, but always look to form a deeper, contextual understanding based on our thorough knowledge of Western society and online culture. It’s through this wide-angle angle that we can raise some questions about whether the Oregonian’s clean slate program is really doing as much good as Therese might hope it does. Because if there’s one thing you have to know about online newspapers, it’s that they don’t have full authority over where their content gets copy-pasted to and replayed across the internet. In fact, there are lots of websites such as The Internet Archive that store copies of newspaper articles as soon as they go online, so even if the newspaper changes the story to remove someone’s name, it’s still their in the archive, ready to be searched up.
Now, it can be argued that archive.org is a lot less discoverable via search engines than something like the Oregonian since usually search engines prefer to give searchers the newest version of the article they are searching for. And if you want the archived version, you usually have to actually go to the Internet Archive and put in the URL yourself. But newspaper articles about things like petty (and not-so-petty) crimes are hot-button issues, and in the modern era of artificial intelligence (AI) language models, there are emerging companies that specifically comb the web for negative-sounding articles about regular people and repost the articles all over the place, with crazy search-engine optimization (SEO) to boot. This is done to farm clicks and make ad revenue, but we can also guess that there’s a more nefarious motive in play, such as to generate so much negative buzz that the victim of the tarnished reputation is willing to pay an affiliate company to remove the information.
So what we learn here is that while it’s great that Therese is doing her part, it’s not the whole part, but just part of the part.
As if you needed it—maybe that’s why you should stay subscribed to our Hades Ethics Consultancy Ethics Q&A, which is always committed to giving you the whole story about any ethical predicament you bring to the table. Send us your ethical pickles at hades@acaciavalleyhoa.org and may you stay morally aligned in the Happy New Year.