Overview
Nearly every site in this business is organized by the name of the website your problem is sitting on. This one is organized by what the thing is and by where it shows up, and the reason is worth two minutes of your time.
Organizing by website sounds helpful and falls apart immediately. You end up with six pages that all say approximately the same paragraph about the same large social network, because the interesting differences are not between websites. They are between kinds of content and kinds of surface. The rules for a photograph and the rules for a comment are wildly different even when both are on the same site, and a photograph obeys nearly the same rules wherever it is hosted.
Worse, organizing by website answers a question nobody has. Nobody sits down at midnight and thinks “I would like to read about a website.” They think about a specific thing that has their name on it.
The two questions that actually get asked
People ask two things, in this order.
Can this go? That is a question about the thing itself — what kind of content it is, and therefore who has the power to take it down. It has one answer per kind of content, and the answer barely moves depending on which site it landed on.
And does it matter where it is? That is a question about the surface — where somebody actually bumps into it. It has a different answer for the ranked links, for the pictures, for the words predicted under the search box, for a summary a machine wrote, and for a copy sitting in an archive.
Those two questions are the two halves of this site. Six kinds of content on one side, six surfaces on the other. Each side splits into three groups, and the groups are not decorative — each one is a genuinely different answer.
Three groups for what is out there
Things somebody published. A news article, a blog post, a forum thread. What ties these together is that a person or a newsroom chose to publish it, and nothing in US law obliges any of them to unpublish it. An editor may agree to a correction. A site owner may agree out of decency. Neither is a route in any meaningful sense, and there is no operator standing above them with a form.
Records and databases. Court files and arrest records, and the companies that copy public records into a profile of you. These behave nothing like published writing. A record is changed only by a court, if at all, and the copies made from it are separate from it. A broker's listing is decided by a compliance queue that will process your request and then refill from the sources it buys.
Photographs, video and the people who know you. The hardest to live with, and the group that holds the strongest routes. Certain categories of imagery have real routes with published criteria, and free services behind them. A post by an ex or a relative is measured against a platform's written rules by a reviewer, and stands or falls on whether it breaks one.
Three groups for where people find it
What a name search returns. The ranked links and the pictures. Both respond to work over time, neither is under anyone's control, and no operator publishes how long a change takes or whether it happens at all.
Predictions and answer engines. The words that appear as somebody types, and the summaries a machine writes above the results. Grouped together because they share the one feature that matters: no operator publishes a route for a private person to change either of them. They are also the surfaces most often promised in a sales call.
Copies and properties. Archived copies of pages, and the profiles you own. An odd pairing until you see it — these are the two surfaces that outlive everything else. The copy survives your removal, and the profile survives because you keep it. One works against you and one for you, and both matter after the excitement of a takedown is over.
What this arrangement is not
It is not a diagnosis of your situation, and I would rather you knew that before you spent an hour reading. Finding the group your problem sits in tells you what kind of answer to expect. It does not tell you what will happen to your item, because that depends on wording, on rules, and on somebody else's decision. Two people with the same category of problem regularly get different answers, and neither of them was badly advised.
It is also not a menu. None of these six groups is a service and none of them is something to buy. Anybody quoting you a figure to handle a whole group at once has stopped describing the work and started describing a package.
And it will not sort your problem into one box. Almost nobody has a single-box problem. One item usually lives in a content group and shows up on two or three surfaces at the same time, which is precisely why arranging this by website hides the shape of it. A photograph on a forum thread is a photograph problem, a published-writing problem, an image-results problem and an archive problem, and those four have four different owners and four different answers. It also means that hiring somebody because they say they specialize in one particular website will not help you much: the website your item lives on is the least useful fact about it.
How to use it
Start on the side that matches the question keeping you awake. If your question is “can this go,” start with what is out there and find the kind of content you are looking at. If your question is “how many people are seeing this,” start with where people find it. Then cross to the other side, because you will need both before any of it makes sense, and because the honest answer to the first question is often no while the honest answer to the second is more encouraging than you expect.
If you would like someone to place your own situation in this frame and tell you plainly which parts are reachable, that is what an assessment with me is for.
Published