Right to be Delisted: Attitudes toward delisting of public interest information

There is a growing trend of legislation, regulation, and court rulings mandating the delisting of content from intermediary platforms. However, few, if any, studies have evaluated user reactions to edge cases involving the delisting of content of public interest. We administered a vignette-based online survey experiment to a representative sample of over 20,000 participants in five countries. We sought to understand user perceptions of delisting content from search engine results and the factors that influence them. While leaving information accessible in search engine results generally leads to warmer feelings towards those search engines, we find that contextual elements also impact this resulting warmth. In addition, we analyze respondents' knowledge and attitudes about the ``Right to be Forgotten'' (RTBF), perhaps the most well-known legislation on delisting. We find that respondents in countries with active RTBF legislation are more likely to support delisting, know more about RTBF, and support RTBF, and that RTBF knowledge/attitudes affects respondents' answers to our experiment. These results indicate a complex tension around delisting public-interest content from search engines' results. Experts sensitive to local context should perform reviews to ensure that delisting requests are handled in a way that meets users’ expectations.