Which side are you on?

Introduction

Once selected the five queries and the articles containing meaningful quotes for each of them, we mapped the results in order to point out the speakers, their positions and the main issues.

The host net concerning the selected articles shows the following results: four out of five queries are somehow connected, except “Right to oblivion” -forgotten, which is clearly isolated.
There are only a few hosts that act as bridge between the other four queries, but none of them shared by all of the clusters.
Only one host (theguardian.com) acts as bridge between “Right to be forgotten” “Freedom of information”, “Right to be forgotten” Censorship and “Right to be forgotten” Privacy.
“Right to be forgotten” “Freedom of information” is almost isolated from “Right to be forgotten” Censorship and “Right to be forgotten” Privacy, which are strictly connected to each other, as well as to “Right to be forgotten”.

How to read the visualization

The visualization is made up of an alluvial diagram that shows the speakers of the quotes found on the articles on the left of the graph, while in the central part of it we can see their positions, and on the right part we can find the issues of the debate.
There are five different visualizations, each of them corresponding to a single query, and a further one, which contains the data of the previous five visualizations, as a sum of them.
Moreover we decided to show the name of the journals where the writer expressed an opinion about the topic.

How it has been done

We selected five queries in order to bring out speakers and positions, then we picked twenty-five google results containing meaningful quotes for each query.
Afterwards we mapped the results to distinguish the speakers of the quotes for each query, their positions and the issues to which they apply their arguments.
Eventually we made a final visualization as a sum of the results of the five queries, to have a total view of the results.

Findings

In the graph were "Right to be forgotten" is put next to "Censorship" we see an increasing on the side speaking against the debated principle, pointing out how the media world and the most important Internet companies fight it, while the governments which contributed to determine this right, obviously still support it, but in a smaller way.

Though the main issue invoked by the speakers was of course the censorship itself, we can notice here and in all visualizations that another issue quoted from both opposing and pro with critics is the position of the search engine Google which found itself in a messy situation.
"Freedom of information" combined with "Right to be forgotten" gives back another mole of results opposing the controversial right, this time apparently with less extremism as size of the fluxes. Here even more than the previous the national european governments back the legislation, apart from the U.K., but in this case the academic world part in higher percentage with the hostile side, as well as many Internet rights associations. The query containing "Privacy" highlights a point of view which tends to be in favor to the "Right to be forgotten", since this principle is designed to protect the individual privacy online, it is a strong argument of the speakers coming from the national authorities that are working on it or either applied in previous cases, like Argentina, Italy and Germany. In this case also many blogs, web rights associations, and academic actors tend to speak in favor of it.

The different fluxes of quotes shows that we're picturing a very and controversial as well as balanced topic, especially by looking at the equilibrium of positions in the combined fluxes of all the five queries.

Metadata

Timestamp: 14/11/2014 - 05/12/2014

Data source: Google

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