Takedown
It works, it is not a formality,
and it has a deadline we hold ourselves to.
Anyone can ask — an author, a reader, or a person who appears in a document and never asked to. A first response within 72 hours. Unredacted personal information is unpublished while it is assessed, not after.
A takedown process that is slow, conditional, or reachable only by people with a lawyer is a takedown process that does not exist. The people most likely to need this one are the least likely to have any of those things.
How to ask
Email takedown@bornbetween2generals.com, or use the link at the bottom of any post. Include the link to the post, and say what should come out and why. You do not need a legal citation, a form of words, or a lawyer.
You do not have to identify yourself unless the request is about your own personal information — in which case we may need enough to confirm that the information is in fact yours, and we ask for the least that will do it.
A human answer within 72 hours of receipt, saying what we have done or what we are doing and when it will be decided. Not an automated acknowledgement, and not silence. If we ever miss it, the miss is recorded in the transparency figures below rather than absorbed.
What happens immediately
Some requests do not wait for an assessment. If a request states that a post contains unredacted personal information — a home address, a phone number, an identification number, medical information, anything identifying a minor — the post is unpublished on receipt and assessed afterwards.
That order is deliberate and it is the one thing on this page that is not a balance of interests. The cost of unpublishing a legitimate post for two days is an inconvenience to its author. The cost of leaving a witness’s address up for two days while somebody considers it is not recoverable.
“Unpublished” means unpublished
The post stops being served, and it is removed from the public read API — so the copies rendered by the widget on authors’ own sites stop showing it too. It is not merely delisted from search or hidden from a feed.
What we assess
Requests fall into a few kinds and they are not treated alike.
Personal information of a third partyUnpublished on receipt. The usual outcome is a redacted repost — the research stands, the personal detail comes out — and that is done with the author where it can be. Where it cannot, the post stays down.
Information about a minorSame handling, and it is not returned to the author to decide. This mirrors how the redaction scan treats the same category on the way in.
The document is not what the post says it isForged, altered, mislabelled, or from a different case entirely. We cannot verify documents, so what we can do is put the objection to the author, require a response, and annotate or remove the post if none comes. The annotation stays on the record either way.
The post is wrong about what the document meansUsually a correction rather than a removal. A correction is visible: what changed, when, and why, kept with the post. A disputed reading that is honestly held and clearly provenanced is argument, and argument is what this place is for.
A legal demandRead, answered, and taken seriously. Also weighed — a demand from a well-resourced institution about a correctly-provenanced release of its own records is the most predictable kind of request we will get, and the easiest kind of platform to be.
“This is embarrassing to us”A lawfully released public record, correctly provenanced, accurately described, containing no third-party personal information, stays up. That is the whole point of the room. The refusal is recorded and counted.
What the author gets
- Told, always. An author is notified when a post of theirs is unpublished or removed, what was asserted, and by which category — not who asked, when the request came from a person whose own information is at issue.
- A chance to fix it. Most of these end with a redacted repost. The research survives; the detail that should never have been in it does not.
- An appeal. One review by someone who did not make the first decision. It is not unlimited, and it is not a negotiation.
- A visible record. Removals appear on an author’s page. Not as a punishment — as part of the record of how somebody works. An author who has corrected and reposted is showing you something.
What gets reported
Counts, published periodically: requests received, by category; how many were actioned and how many refused; how many were answered inside 72 hours and how many were not. Legal demands are counted separately, and the count includes demands that were refused.
No numbers are shown here yet
This platform has not been operating long enough to have any, and a transparency report with invented figures on it would be a strange thing to put on a page about documentary evidence. When there are numbers they will appear here, with the period they cover.
The limits of this process
- We cannot un-publish the internet. A post that was public was public. It may be in someone’s archive, a search cache, or a screenshot, and removal here does nothing to those. This is the strongest argument for the scan being on the way in rather than the way out.
- We cannot verify documents, so a claim that something is forged is assessed on argument, not on examination. Stated in full here →
- This is not a legal process and nothing on this page is legal advice. It is a service policy. It does not replace a statutory right and it does not create one.
- We will get some of these wrong. The appeal exists because of that, and so does the published count of what we refused.
The order of operations
Down first, decide second.
Where a request says unredacted personal information is on the page, the post comes down while it is assessed. A wrongly unpublished post is an inconvenience with a remedy. The other error does not have one.
How this works
0:57 · narrated · captioned · served from this site, and nothing is sent anywhere when you press play. Prefer to read it? The transcript is below.
Transcript
| At | Section | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| 0:02 | Who can ask | Anyone. An author, a reader, or a person who appears in a document and never asked to. No legal citation, no particular form of words, and no lawyer required. |
| 0:13 | The deadline | A human answer within seventy-two hours of receipt, saying what has been done or when it will be decided. Not an automated acknowledgement, and not silence. |
| 0:22 | Down first | If a request says a post carries unredacted personal information, the post is unpublished on receipt and assessed afterwards. That order is not a balance of interests. |
| 0:34 | What refuses | A lawfully released record, correctly provenanced and accurately described, with no third-party personal information in it, stays up. Refusals are counted and published. |
| 0:44 | The limit | Removal cannot recall what was public. Archives and screenshots are outside this system, which is why the scan sits on the way in rather than the way out. |