Comment by Gigachad
4 years ago
The IA has really lost its reputation as an archive by choosing to remove content down for political purposes. They see themselves as publishers rather than an archive.
4 years ago
The IA has really lost its reputation as an archive by choosing to remove content down for political purposes. They see themselves as publishers rather than an archive.
I attempted to google to guess what you meant.
I found: (1) they recently removed KiwiFarms; (2) in 2020, they began labeling certain pages with "fact checks"; (3) they remove content by request of the site owner or by copyright complaint.
Of those, (2) seems the most political, but it's not removing content. Was there something else you had in mind?
Removing kiwi farms was a bad decision. The copyright and site owner did not request it and the content was not illegal. So the IA is picking content to delist based on their own feelings rather than simply archiving.
Had to look up what Kiwi Farm even is/was.
> Supporters of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign celebrated the Internet Archive’s decision. “Internet heroes right here,” tweeted Yonah Gerber, who urged the Archive to remove the site. Kiwi Farms is known for collecting and publicizing personal details about targets it holds in contempt, many of whom are transgender women like Sorrenti. While the site ostensibly discourages direct harassment, Sorrenti has faced swatting attacks and persistent threats during her campaign, and other targets have had similarly ugly experiences. Kiwi Farms has been allegedly linked with three suicides, including an emulator developer who blamed the site for a relentless harassment operation soon before their death. [1]
Yeah, I have to say that I recognize nuance and am okay with archive.org nixing content like the above.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23341051/kiwi-farms-intern...
1 reply →
> the content was not illegal
The content was clearly libelous and defamatory, which is pretty illegal. In some countries it would also count as harassement.
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Indeed. It goes against everything the site claims to be about.
They also remove legal pornographic content https://archive.org/post/1053748/porn-on-ia-wtf https://archive.org/post/1123868/no-bdsm-allowed
I think that puritanism and archivism are not compatible.
They also removed ISIS stuff https://archive.org/post/1033012/constant-removal-of-isis-vi...
Removing evidence of war-crimes and disallowing future historians from accessing such content in the future is not a policy that I would expect from an archive.
(1) is egregious if the goal is an archive of the internet.
An archive should have everything of what is being archived, legalese notwithstanding: The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, everything. E v e r y t h i n g . If it doesn't have everything, it's not an archive.
of course "not visible in the wayback machine" doesn't mean "they don't have it".
What did they remove?
Evidence of unsavoury and most likely illegal behavior of a man with powerful friends in the tech industry.
If you know the right people with the right political views, even the IA will capitulate.