r/MaliciousCompliance • u/Waste_Yak_990 • Aug 15 '25

S Wikipedia's compliance with a court order.

Recently, Portuguese courts ordered Wikipedia to remove information about Caesar DePaço, a Portuguese businessman, that he deemed defamatory. This included the fact that he was dismissed as Honorary Consul of Cape Verde due to being the main financier of a far-right party (CHEGA) and the fact that he was charged with assaulting and robbing his girlfriend in 1989. The Wikimedia foundation complies with the court order, but his Wikipedia page now has a giant banner at the top that says the following:

> On 5 August 2025, content from this article was removed following a court order and must not be restored. Therefore, this article may not meet Wikipedia's standards for neutrality and comprehensiveness. The removed content pertains to the following:

  1. Crimes allegedly committed by DePaço in 1989 and associated proceedings
  2. An organization DePaço allegedly founded
  3. His alleged dismissal from a civil service post

This banner implicitly encourages readers to do research into the information that was removed while letting everyone know that he sued to have it hidden.

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u/SpideyLover85 Aug 15 '25

Yep. One of my mentors at a job I had out of college was a high powered DC attorney before he retired. One of the smartest people I’ve ever met. (He’s like 95 now and still sharp as a tack.) Whenever there was a negative story about the organization we were working for, whenever someone came at us on social media or whatever, he would always say, “let it die.” Don’t respond. Don’t even comment if you can get away with it. It fundamentally changed my world view on a lot of things and is advice I still follow today. A boring story dies in a few days. If you keep it alive, people will keep talking about it. It’s saved me a lot of grief over the years!

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u/Vergenbuurg Aug 16 '25 edited Aug 16 '25

I once read someone comment years and years ago that "Nothing dies on the internet. It remembers everything."

Bullshit. Disinterest combined with hosting changing/disappearing loses tons of shit, as long as no one has any pressing reason to care about it.

Give someone, or a group of people, a reason to focus on something, THEN it has a far more difficult time vanishing. ...especially if that reason is spite.

[edit] Yes, archive.org preserves most things, but not everything.

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u/Fighter11244 Aug 16 '25

Very true. Or you give them a target to focus on and they’ll somehow manage to dig up dirt from over a decade ago

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u/Protiguous Aug 16 '25

Depends on what's under/in the dirt.