The second thing that came to mind was paywall evasion. Any time a news article behind a paywall gets posted here, someone in the comments has the archive link ready to go, because of course they do.
The incentives for online news are really wacky just to begin with. A coin at the convenience store for the whole dang paper used to be the simplest thing in the world.
> Limit internet archive for articles that are less than a week old.
I mean this as a side note rather than a counterargument (because people learn to take screenshots, and because what can you do about particularly bad faith news orgs?): Immediate archival can capture silent changes (and misleadingly announced changes). A headline might change to better fit the article body. An editor's note might admit a mistakenly attributed quote.
Or a news org might pull a Fox News [1][2] by rewriting both the headline and article body to cover up a mistake that unravels the original article's reason for existing: The original headline was "SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown". The headline was changed to "AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral". An editor's note was added [3][4]: "This article previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that. This has been corrected." I think Fox News deleted the article.
The second thing that came to mind was paywall evasion. Any time a news article behind a paywall gets posted here, someone in the comments has the archive link ready to go, because of course they do.
The incentives for online news are really wacky just to begin with. A coin at the convenience store for the whole dang paper used to be the simplest thing in the world.
I suppose that could be solved with a delay. Limit internet archive for articles that are less than a week old.
> Limit internet archive for articles that are less than a week old.
I mean this as a side note rather than a counterargument (because people learn to take screenshots, and because what can you do about particularly bad faith news orgs?): Immediate archival can capture silent changes (and misleadingly announced changes). A headline might change to better fit the article body. An editor's note might admit a mistakenly attributed quote.
Or a news org might pull a Fox News [1][2] by rewriting both the headline and article body to cover up a mistake that unravels the original article's reason for existing: The original headline was "SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown". The headline was changed to "AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral". An editor's note was added [3][4]: "This article previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that. This has been corrected." I think Fox News deleted the article.
[1] https://xcancel.com/KFILE/status/1984673901872558291
[2] https://archive.ph/NL6oR
[3] https://xcancel.com/JusDayDa/status/1984693256417083798
[4] https://archive.ph/XEI9E
That would diminish archival accuracy, an outlet could amend the text without third party proof.
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If the content was fully paywalled, it wouldn't be possible to archive it (unless the archiver paid for a subscription).
The reason the archiving works is because they expose the content publicly so search engines can index it.
> Any time a news article behind a paywall gets posted here, someone in the comments has the archive link ready to go, because of course they do.
I have no idea why this behavior is even acceptable.