The Internet Never Forgets. You're a Fool If You Think Otherwise.

No, $175,000 will not erase a blemish from your digital past. Ever.

Photo illustration by Elizabeth Griffin

The Internet is a vast, horrible behemoth, whose inscrutable inner workings are unknowable to either God or man. There are, however, a few maxims that are reliably said to govern its behavior: 

1.) Don't read the comments. 

2.) Yes, there's a porn version. 

3.) The harder you try to get people not to talk about something, the more they will.

Consider: In 2013, an unflattering picture of Beyoncé performing at the Super Bowl appeared on Buzzfeed, which her publicist soon asked the site to remove. You may be familiar with what happened next, as the photo spiraled into thousands of Photoshopped variations that cemented the image in our collective memory. More recently, Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker for publishing his sex tape won him a large payday, but it also turned news of its existence, and his related racist rants, into a spectacle that captivated the media for weeks.

This week, UC Davis found itself at the center of a similar scenario, as news emerged that it spent $175,000 in an attempt to remove evidence of one of its most embarrassing moments—a campus police officer pepper-spraying peaceful student protesters in the face. Unsurprisingly, the bungled effort resulted in the years-old story gaining new life, rocketing to the top of "UC Davis" search results. 


In politics, the saying goes, the cover-up is always worse than the crime. On the Internet, any cover-up is just another opportunity to remind everyone that the crime happened in the first place.

That's owed largely to what is known as the Streisand Effect. In 2003, Barbara Streisand attempted to remove photographs of her home in California from an online collection. In suing the photographer, she exponentially exacerbated the problem, and the little-seen photos racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Whoops. 

It's the same phenomenon at work whenever a book is banned or a movie is met with criticism from its subject. The Church of Scientology found out the hard way trying to get a clip of Tom Cruise removed from the Internet years ago. You'll also see its cruel machinations at work whenever a restaurant or artist complains about a bad review or a litigious scold cries libel. Actor James Woods' lawsuit and meltdown after an anonymous Twitter user called him a cocaine addict did little besides prompt the tens of thousands who saw the news to think: Hmm, I wonder if James Woods is a cocaine addict?

Which brings us back  to UC Davis. Documents obtained by the Sacramento Bee through the California Public Records Act show that, following the 2011 pepper spraying incident, the school engaged in an attempted public relations salvo to remove the story, or at least diminish its online footprint. As the Bee reported, the payments, made to two separate firms—a company called Nevins & Associates and a second called IDMLOCO—were meant to polish the school's damaged reputation.

"Nevins & Associates is prepared to create and execute an online branding campaign designed to clean up the negative attention the University of California, Davis, and Chancellor Katehi have received related to the events that transpired in November 2011," Nevins proposed, an assignment they happily attempted to the tune of $15,000 a month of public dollars. "Online evidence and the venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the Chancellor are being filtered through the 24-hour news cycle, but it is at a tepid pace."

The proposal from IDMLOCO said the company would "identify key messages and themes we can use to counter negative results and help your team develop a single voice across all digital channels."

It may have taken a while, but the plan seems to have worked—just, you know, with the exact opposite effect than intended. 

If you were to search right now for the "University of California, Davis," just under the school's homepage link in the first set of news results you'll find the Bee story about the cover-up. It's followed by similar stories on Gawker and Boing Boing. In fact, if you merely type "UC Davis" into the search bar, there it is again in the auto-fill suggestions: "UC Davis pepper spray" sandwiched between "UC Davis picnic day" and "UC Davis basketball."

While online reputation management has been a growing field in recent years—Europe recently passed a "right to be forgotten" law to help individuals purge negative search results associated with their identities—that's a prospect much easier achieved when it's for one specific individual. When it's a sensational news story that shocked the country and spawned 10,000 memes, it's a much bigger endeavor.

For that matter, whether or not any such thing can be done in the first place is up for debate.

"This is a misguided and hilariously silly way to look at the Internet," said Ed Zitron of EZPR, a marketing and media relations company based in San Francisco. "I can't believe someone read 'advise and support UC Davis' adoption of Google platforms' and said, 'Oh yes, here's $15,000 a month.' What does that even mean? Google is pretty smart when it comes to their search results being transparently gamed, say, by a for-profit company working to literally remove search results."

"This seems like a ripoff," he said, adding that plenty of PR firms attempt to scam clients in cases like these by making "weird, serpentine, bizarre proposals that sound 'right'" and telling people what they want to hear. "How can they modify existing content? Are they going to modify the news? This entire thing they promised sounds like complete hogwash."

The school, for its part, seems to think it was working with the students' best interests in mind.

"We have worked to ensure that the reputation of the university, which the chancellor leads, is fairly portrayed," UC Davis spokeswoman Dana Topousis told the Bee. "We wanted to promote and advance the important teaching, research and public service done by our students, faculty and staff, which is the core mission of our university."

All of those things, to be fair, are true and worthy of attention. But if there's one thing the university could teach its students here, it's the most important lesson of all regarding digital literacy: The Internet never forgets. 

As the old saying goes, you can't spray the pepper back into the can.

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