Thousands of informational government webpages have been taken down so far in the second Trump administration, including on public health, scientific research and LGBTQ rights. Amid this mass erasure of public information, the Internet Archive is racing to save copies of those deleted resources. The San Francisco-based nonprofit operates the Wayback Machine, a popular tool that saves snapshots of websites that may otherwise be lost forever, and it has archived federal government websites at each presidential transition since 2004. While it’s normal for a new administration to overhaul some of its online resources, the Trump administration’s pace of destruction has shocked many archivists. “There have been thousands and thousands of pages removed,” says Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, who notes that even a page about the U.S. Constitution was scrubbed from the White House website.

I wonder if this is why there have been unprecedented attacks on the Internet Archive.

KayLeadfoot
link
fedilink
42M

Love the versioning. Saw minor edits to the “Fork in the Road” landing page over time, including the cleaning up of just plain sloppy typos. They clearly deployed half-cocked, didn’t even run spell-check.

jlow (he/him)
link
fedilink
3
edit-2
2M

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

  • 0 users online
  • 63 users / day
  • 273 users / week
  • 656 users / month
  • 1.29K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 1.68K Posts
  • 28.2K Comments
  • Modlog