Washington spent decades rigging the rules in its own favor.
Now someone found a way to make the news itself disappear.
And the price list starts at $2,800 a story.
The Fake Copyright Claim That Erased 100 News Stories Before a Florida Election
You are a politician with a problem — a news story, a court record, an investigative piece that voters are about to find. You hire a reputation management firm.
The firm creates a shell company with a name like "Pedrick Enterprises." The shell company files a copyright complaint with Google, claiming the news article stole content from a website that didn't exist three weeks ago. Google pulls the article. No judge reviews it. No court orders it. No one verifies the claim is real.
The article is gone before most voters ever see it.
This is not a hypothetical. It happened in Florida this past August, two weeks before the Republican primary in the 22nd Congressional District.
Bogus copyright takedown requests — filed by shadowy U.K. shell companies — scrubbed more than 100 news articles from Google search results over a three-week period.
The stories covered congressional candidate Michael Carbonara's ties to a controversial bitcoin mine in rural Michigan, directly across the street from an outdoors-focused elementary school that sued the operation over the noise from supercomputers running around the clock.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel, WLRN, Florida Politics, and a Michigan public radio station were all targeted and had stories about Carbonara temporarily erased.
When Google restored some of the articles after being alerted to the fraud, new fake complaints were filed within days — and the stories vanished again.
Early voting began August 8. The primary was August 18.
A First Amendment attorney who reviewed the takedown requests called it "absolute censorship." Carbonara's campaign denied involvement. His spokeswoman later declined comment.
The identity of whoever filed the complaints remains unknown. Under the current law, it can stay that way forever.
$2,800 a Link: The Reputation Laundering Firm Behind the DMCA Takedown Abuse
The people behind the Florida scheme did not invent it.
A Spanish company called Eliminalia turned this exact scheme into a global business. Leaked documents revealed it charged clients roughly $2,800 per link removed and built a roster of nearly 1,500 across 54 countries — Mexican governors, Venezuelan oligarchs, anyone with a record worth hiding.
The firm copied real news articles onto fake websites with backdated timestamps, then filed copyright complaints claiming the original journalism had stolen their content.
Google complied, the real articles vanished, and once the fake websites had served their purpose, those came down too — leaving no trace of who did it or why.
Federal law requires DMCA filers to swear under penalty of perjury that their claims are accurate. Eliminalia employees checked that box thousands of times for claims they knew were fabricated. Prosecutions: zero.
The law that made all of this possible — the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998 to fight online music piracy — gives platforms like Google no real choice. Pull flagged content fast or face massive copyright liability.
The result is a system with no requirement to verify a complaint is real, no meaningful penalty for filing a fraudulent one, and no mechanism to notify the journalist whose work just disappeared.
A bad actor with $2,800 and an internet connection can erase a news story before a single voter finds it.
How DMCA Abuse Becomes Election Censorship Before Ballots Are Cast
A candidate has a damaging story drop six weeks before Election Day. Under normal circumstances, voters search the name, find the coverage, and make an informed decision. Under this system, a flurry of fraudulent DMCA complaints goes out the same week. Google pulls the articles within days. By the time the stories are restored, early voting is over. The damage is contained. The voters who would have cared never knew to look.
Whoever has the budget and the willingness to file fraudulent federal complaints gets to control what voters find when they search.
Right now, the going rate for that service is publicly known, the firms offering it are still operating, and the law provides almost no deterrent.
Congress has had years to fix this. Instead, it is considering legislation that would expand it.
Congress Is Expanding the Law That Made Google Search Censorship This Easy
The Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act and the Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors Act are moving through Congress under the banner of stopping overseas piracy websites. What they would actually create are federal court orders forcing internet providers to block entire domains — without the due process protections that apply in ordinary copyright cases.
The entertainment industry wants these tools to go after streaming piracy sites — and whatever anyone thinks of that goal, the infrastructure it requires is a censorship machine waiting for the right operator.
America tried this once before. In 2012, Congress pushed SOPA and PIPA — sweeping site-blocking bills with the same pitch. Both died under massive public backlash. Thirteen years later, the same bills are moving again with different names and a quieter opposition.
The Carbonara case used the existing system — one DMCA form per article, one shell company per complaint. The new legislation would allow one court order to take down an entire domain.
Every article a news outlet ever published. Every story a local paper ran on a candidate's record. Gone, with a single filing, before a judge who hears only one side of the argument.
The people who erased 100 stories about a Florida primary candidate before the polls opened would not need $2,800 a link anymore.
They would need one order.
Sources:
- Drew Wilson, "Shadowy Copyright Claims Scrubbed Michael Carbonara Stories from Google," Florida Politics, August 5, 2026.
- "Growing Threat to Free Speech: Bogus Copyright Claims Are Making Political Stories Disappear," South Florida Sun Sentinel, August 16, 2026.
- Brandon Butler, "Forget Smear Campaigns. Politicians Now Use Copyright Law to Scrub the Truth," Washington Examiner, September 1, 2026.
- "Eliminalia: DMCA Fraud, 1,500 Clients and Reputation Laundering Exposed," Investigations.org, April 30, 2026.
- H.R.791, Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act, 119th Congress, introduced January 2025.
