11-02-2024, 12:22 AM
This post was last modified 11-02-2024, 12:32 AM by UltraBudgie.
Edit Reason: word choice
This is sort of ominous. The service that snapshots newspapers and other websites, archive.org, was hit by an attack last month. While the site is back "online", I've just heard that it is not showing snapshots of anything after October 10th:
This is called the "memory hole" effect -- where the internet can rewrite or remove history, leaving no trace. There have also been other changes, too -- videos reported inaccessible at YouTube, search results disappearing or turning into duplicate garbage after a few dozen "trustworthy" results, content hidden among mountains of AI-generated spam, and more.
Google used to allow access to "cached" versions of sites, accessible when the original page had been removed or couldn't be loaded; that feature is now gone.
The timing of this is suspect, indeed, and it's gotten much worse very quickly, but this has been a creeping incremental problem for years. Searching for historical events has become more and more difficult, and it seems most people just resort to Wikipedia or other "approved narratives". Anyone have any research advice?
Will the history that is written about Election 2024 be accurate? How will we know?
Quote:Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
Source: They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now
This is called the "memory hole" effect -- where the internet can rewrite or remove history, leaving no trace. There have also been other changes, too -- videos reported inaccessible at YouTube, search results disappearing or turning into duplicate garbage after a few dozen "trustworthy" results, content hidden among mountains of AI-generated spam, and more.
Google used to allow access to "cached" versions of sites, accessible when the original page had been removed or couldn't be loaded; that feature is now gone.
The timing of this is suspect, indeed, and it's gotten much worse very quickly, but this has been a creeping incremental problem for years. Searching for historical events has become more and more difficult, and it seems most people just resort to Wikipedia or other "approved narratives". Anyone have any research advice?
Will the history that is written about Election 2024 be accurate? How will we know?
