Chief executive of the online reputation laundering outfit The Transparency Company Maury Blackman (pictured), has been trying to erase details of his 2021 domestic violence arrest since the story first emerged. The saga was first unearthed in 2023 by independent journalist Jack Poulson, who reported on Blackman's arrest while he was still boss at surveillance tech peddler Premise Data Corp.

According to Ars Technica charges were never filed after Blackman’s then 25-year-old girlfriend recanted, but Poulson highlighted some worrying details from the police report. Since then, Blackman has pulled out the full playbook, DMCA takedowns, legal threats, and now what appears to be a partnership with Google’s undercooked search tools.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) claims that by June, Poulson's article had mysteriously vanished from Google search. Digging into the disappearance, FPF found that Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool was to blame. Designed to clean up broken or outdated links, it’s now being blamed for giving cover to censorship.

According to the Foundation, an unnamed party exploited a bug that allowed valid articles to be de-indexed by subtly altering capitalisation in URLs. Because Google's system ignored case sensitivity while treating the links as broken, it nuked the actual articles from results.

Poulson later discovered two of his Substack pieces had been wiped in the same way. FPF confirmed its own post on Blackman was completely missing, even when searched by exact title.

“The bug allowed malicious actors to scrub search results without actually taking anything down from the web,” the Foundation said.

The irony, of course, is that Blackman now heads a company with “transparency” in the name while allegedly leaning on tech glitches to bury public records of his own arrest. That sort of openness only seems to run one way.