How to Remove a Vice Article: What's Changed and What Still Works

What Happened to Vice Media

Vice Media Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2023 after years of declining revenues, failed strategic pivots, and a valuation collapse from its peak of approximately $5.7 billion to a fraction of that figure. The bankruptcy filing came after Vice failed to find a buyer willing to take on the full company. The assets -- including the Vice brand, its digital properties, and its archive -- were subsequently sold to a group of secured lenders led by Fortress Investment Group. The sale price was reported at approximately $350 million, a fraction of the company's former valuation.

The acquisition by Fortress-led lenders resulted in a significant operational restructuring. Vice's television operations were wound down, its magazine was shuttered, and the majority of its editorial staff was laid off. What survived was the digital brand and archive, which the new ownership group maintained as an operating asset -- continuing to host and serve the full archive of Vice's published content without the newsroom that originally created it. The Vice brand has continued to operate in a reduced capacity, but the publication's peak-era editorial culture, editorial independence, and investigative ambitions effectively ended with the bankruptcy.

The Archive Problem

The core issue for anyone covered in Vice's archive is that the bankruptcy changed nothing about the search visibility of previously published content. Google's index does not distinguish between articles published by a vibrant newsroom and articles maintained by a post-bankruptcy holding company. The authority that Vice's domain accumulated during its peak years -- through backlinks from major newspapers, from social media sharing at enormous scale, from academic citations, and from syndication partnerships -- still attaches to every article in the archive. An article that was shared 50,000 times on social media in 2018 still carries the link equity generated by that sharing, regardless of what has happened to the company since.

The practical consequence is that Vice articles from the 2015–2022 period can rank on the first page of Google for covered names indefinitely. The lack of active editorial operations at Vice means that no new content is being produced to dilute the search visibility of archive content -- but the existing archive's search authority is also not being actively grown. This creates a specific suppression opportunity: Vice's domain authority is slowly declining from its peak as it fails to accumulate new inbound links at its previous rate, which makes suppression campaigns more tractable over time than they would have been at peak authority.

Who Runs Vice Now and How to Contact Them

Following the Fortress-led acquisition, Vice's digital operations are managed by the new ownership entity. The original editorial team -- the reporters, editors, and section heads who created the content in Vice's archive -- have largely departed through the bankruptcy process. This creates a significant practical problem for anyone seeking a correction or removal: the people who made the editorial decisions about your coverage no longer work there, and the new ownership's editorial structure is not staffed to respond to individual correction requests in the way a functioning newsroom would be.

Contact for editorial matters at Vice's post-bankruptcy entity can be attempted through VICE's editorial contact page -- the masthead contact information and any corrections email address listed on the site. Response times are substantially slower and less consistent than they were during Vice's operational peak. The new ownership's editorial priorities are focused on maintaining the archive's commercial value, not on processing individual correction or removal requests. This does not make outreach pointless -- documented correction requests that arrive via professional channels can still produce responses -- but it does mean expectations should be calibrated accordingly. A professional reputation management firm with established media contacts may have better pathways to the current ownership than a direct approach from an individual subject. Note that Section 230 shields Vice's new ownership from liability for the original editorial content, which limits legal leverage significantly.

Requesting a Correction or Removal

A professional removal or correction request submitted to Vice's current ownership is worth attempting, particularly for articles that contain documented factual inaccuracies or that involve subjects who are private individuals rather than public figures. The framing of the request matters: because the original editorial team is no longer present, a request that focuses on the specific factual problems with the content -- rather than engaging with the editorial judgment that produced it -- is more likely to receive a substantive response from the current custodians of the archive, who are asset managers rather than journalists.

The strongest grounds for a Vice removal or correction request under current ownership are: documented factual inaccuracies with specific evidentiary support; private figure status (the article covers someone who is not a public figure and the public interest in the content is not clearly ongoing); significant elapsed time combined with substantially changed circumstances; or content that falls outside the scope of legitimate journalism by any reasonable standard. Because Vice's current ownership is commercially motivated rather than editorially motivated, requests framed around legal compliance obligations -- GDPR, right to be forgotten, privacy law -- may receive more attention than requests framed purely in editorial terms.

GDPR De-Indexing

For individuals who are EU or UK residents, or who were covered in a context that implicates EU/UK data protection law, GDPR's "right to be forgotten" (formally the right to erasure) provides a mechanism that is particularly relevant to Vice's situation. A successful GDPR de-indexing request submitted to Google results in the removal of a specific URL from Google Search results for searches conducted within the EU and UK. It does not remove the article from Vice's servers -- the article remains accessible if someone navigates directly to the URL -- but it removes the article from appearing when someone searches your name in EU/UK Google Search, which is where the vast majority of reputational searches occur.

GDPR de-indexing requests must demonstrate that the continued indexing of the personal data in question is no longer necessary for the legitimate purpose it was published for, or that the legitimate purpose is outweighed by the data subject's privacy interests. For Vice archive content that is years old, covers a private individual or a matter that is no longer of genuine public interest, or contains personal data that was disproportionate to the journalistic purpose, a GDPR de-indexing argument can be strong. The request is submitted to Google's removal process, not to Vice. Google evaluates the request against the applicable legal standard and either grants or denies de-indexing within the EU/UK. Success rates for well-documented GDPR de-indexing requests for older, lower-public-interest content are meaningfully positive. If Vice articles have also been cached by the Wayback Machine, you can separately request to remove archived copies from the Internet Archive.

Suppression Strategy

The most significant change in the Vice situation since 2023 is that suppression is now meaningfully more achievable than it was during Vice's peak operational years. At its 2018–2019 peak, Vice was one of the most-shared media brands on the internet, generating billions of pageviews and accumulating backlinks from hundreds of major publications. Its domain authority was formidable, and suppression campaigns required extraordinary effort to produce first-page displacement. Since the bankruptcy and operational restructuring, Vice's domain authority has been declining at a gradual but measurable rate as new inbound link accumulation has slowed dramatically.

For Vice articles that did not generate overwhelming secondary coverage during the original publication period, first-page suppression within 9–18 months is now a realistic goal with professional suppression work -- a timeline that would have been optimistic at Vice's operational peak. Articles that generated significant secondary coverage in major publications during the original publication cycle remain harder to suppress because the secondary instances continue to carry their own authority independently of Vice's declining trajectory. The most tractable suppression targets are articles that were primarily read on Vice itself, did not generate major wire service pickup, and cover a name that is not itself an extremely competitive search term. A structured suppression strategy is the most reliable framework, and understanding the cost of removal upfront helps set realistic expectations. Also consider whether you need to address any Wayback Machine copies of the article that continue to circulate independently.

Getting Professional Help

The recommended sequence for Vice articles is to pursue editorial removal and GDPR de-indexing (if applicable) simultaneously, then move to professional suppression if editorial removal is not achieved. The free RemoveNews.ai tool generates a professional removal request calibrated for Vice's post-bankruptcy ownership structure in 60 seconds. If you are an EU or UK subject, a GDPR de-indexing request to Google can be submitted in parallel with the editorial request -- these two tracks do not conflict with each other and can be pursued simultaneously.

If both editorial removal and GDPR de-indexing are not available or are unsuccessful, professional suppression targeting Vice's diminished but still meaningful domain authority is the next step. Given Vice's post-bankruptcy trajectory, the window for achieving suppression at a reasonable investment level is better now than it has been at any point since Vice's peak years. Our team can provide a specific assessment of your Vice situation -- including an evaluation of whether GDPR de-indexing applies, what editorial outreach is likely to achieve, and what a realistic suppression campaign would look like in terms of timeline and cost -- in a free consultation. Call us at 855-239-5322 or use the form below.