By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by dmix on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:41PM (#21339830)

Archive.is has constantly faced harassment from people filing DMCA claims and having domain names taken away for bullshit copyright claims.

I'm sure if they started doing this the Twitter outrage warriors wouldn't be happy about it and add to the difficulty of their job.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by 1337biz on Thursday October 24, 2019 @06:19AM (#21343134)

>the Twitter outrage warriors

Somebody should classify this as an addictive behavior.

'The immanent urge to get emotionally excited by interacting with an equally excitable peer group on issues only remotely related to one's personal life'.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by dwild on Thursday October 24, 2019 @10:05AM (#21344774)

Just in case there's confusion, the Internet Archive isn't Archive.is but Archive.org. They are 2 differents organizations.

Internet Archive seems to be handling this kind of trouble quite well.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by nilkn on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:21PM (#21339687)

I noticed a month or two ago that certain sites seem to be excluded even from internet archives like the Wayback Machine. The first example I stumbled on was Snopes. I only noticed because I saw a Snopes link on Reddit where the thumbnail was clearly different from the live version; the thumbnail appeared to show a human-like baby in the womb, whereas the live version had that edited out. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by lucasmullens on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:28PM (#21339740)

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."

To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by chongli on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:56PM (#21339936)

Not only that, if they are archived at one point and later decide to be excluded then all of the archives for that domain are deleted retroactively. This means that a valuable site can be archived for years but if the domain lapses and gets bought up by somebody who decides to exclude the Wayback Machine then all of that precious content is destroyed even though the destroyer never owned it!

I feel like we’re in the Internet equivalent of the early years of Hollywood. We’ve lost so many precious early movies because there were no backups of the film.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by schoen on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:57PM (#21339944)

I don't think your interpretation of the latter case is quite right. In my understanding, the Archive is willing to disable display of the site content retroactively due to a new robots.txt, but they won't delete that content. It will still be present in their files.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by chongli on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @07:01PM (#21339977)

What you’re describing may have been a recent change that I wasn’t aware of. If so, it’s at least some consolation. We could still do better.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by gbear605 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @10:54PM (#21341257)

I believe that that has been the case for the entire existence of Wayback, not just recently.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by TJSomething on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @07:41PM (#21340199)

This policy was actually changed in 2017 to completely ignore robots.txt.

[0] https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by mc32 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:58PM (#21339947)

Deleted or not made available?

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by ryanlol on Thursday October 24, 2019 @04:35AM (#21342705)

If the site goes down and the robots.txt becomes unavailable, the content will become available on internet archive.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by kick on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:52PM (#21339911)

This is how it works, yes.

----> Why isn't the site I'm looking for in the archive?

Some sites may not be included because the automated crawlers were unaware of their existence at the time of the crawl. It's also possible that some sites were not archived because they were password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or otherwise inaccessible to our automated systems. Site owners might have also requested that their sites be excluded from the Wayback Machine.

----> How can I exclude or remove my site's pages from the Wayback Machine?

You can send an email request for us to review to [email protected] with the URL (web address) in the text of your message.

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004651732-Usin...

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by adventured on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:58PM (#21339955)

They've recently made the process intentionally more annoying. You used to be able to exclude a site you control via a robots.txt file. That wouldn't actually delete archived content and would merely hide it from viewing. They no longer honor that approach. You now have to send them an email and specifically request content removal.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by Aloha on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @07:47PM (#21340238)

I consider this to be acceptable.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by bigwavedave on Thursday October 24, 2019 @01:00AM (#21341762)

Most rational people would.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by LocalH on Thursday October 24, 2019 @11:10AM (#21345414)

That approach allowed domain spammers to (unintentionally?) disable access to content that predates their ownership of the domain, so it was a garbage approach. In the current situation, a content owner can still achieve removal, but a subsequent owner of the domain cannot. That's how it should be. If I buy domain x, I should not be able to request the removal of content that was present on domain x before I owned it.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by tropo on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @08:15PM (#21340411)

Snopes kept quietly making politically-motivated changes, and they kept getting caught. Now they can get away with it.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by reaperducer on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:10PM (#21339597)

Or even something more distributed. Like each public library has a storage cube and each cube has an overlapping portion of history. They checksum each other peer-to-peer to detect anyone trying to change history.

There are 110,000 public libraries in the United States. Plus thousands more private libraries. Seems like enough for U.S. history, at least.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by bilbo0s on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:19PM (#21339672)

Shouldn't be the public libraries though. Public libraries will not save certain videos. Especially if the local police or the guys in the blue windbreakers with three yellow letters on them show up.

Maybe that's a problem that everyone has? But it would be best if there was some offshore, FBI proof, kind of way to do this archiving.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by reaperducer on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:51PM (#21339900)

Especially if the local police or the guys in the blue windbreakers with three yellow letters on them show up.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. After 9/11, the libraries were the first to stand up to the government's desperate search for information. The feds wanted everyone's lending history, and ended up backing off when the libraries put up a fight.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by gowld on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @09:12PM (#21340721)

This is what BitTorrent and IPFS is for.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by dredmorbius on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @09:58PM (#21340975)

Those are ultimately transport and distribution systems.

At some point, you need curators and archivists.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by waffle_ss on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:35PM (#21339795)

The Islamic State posted their content for many years on the Internet Archive. I believe IA did take down content in some cases.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by docbrown on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @09:41PM (#21340883)

Modern day jihadist groups are now utilizing Telegram, Whatsapp, and TikTok to preserve and spread material. It’s quite easy to gain access to them — i’ve heard — as many researchers are gaining access to these messages to preserve said materials. Plus these apps give them an ability to easily communicate transcontinentally.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by bilbo0s on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:39PM (#21339822)

Here's the thing, we're never likely to find a place that allows everything. I think most people understand that.

But to find a provider of public access to archives more expansive than YouTube's, well, that's improvement.

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Re:By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging hu... by washadjeffmad on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @07:50PM (#21340253)

With IA, I feel that they probably de-listed the content but are hosting it for a time when it may be safer to reveal it as part of a greater historical record.

I somehow don't get the same impression from same impression from YouTube

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