Carl Malamud is one of those good folks from early Internet culture. His recent work on getting copies of legal codes and making them freely available online is some really basic foundational work in support of American democracy. Very much in the spirit of the Internet Archive, a well deserved award.
I had the pleasure of sitting across from Carl and asking him questions about how to approach issues relating to open access for a project I was working on. I still draw energy and motivation from listening to him for 10 minutes, years ago.
The more nefarious one to me was when Archive scrubbed all of Taylor Lorenz's tweets[1].
Lorenz claims to be a journalist. She is employed by Jeff Bezos's WaPo.
Her tweets are a matter of public record, but because they reveal what an absolutely horrible person she is and how her brand of "journalism" relies on internet terrorism and online persecution, they were scrubbed.
Google of course, did it parts too.
If you truly need to archive something, do not rely on the Internet Archive and their censorship.
Isn't this a simple DMCA takedown? Lorenz's tweets are her intellectual property, she has control over where they are rehosted and IA's hands are basically tied.
Some of that info may turn out to be more than just a little inconvenient[0].
It should be noted that KF is back, and that the PR and associated DDoS campaigns appear only to have made the site more resilient. Whether Internet Archive caches their pages might not even matter in the short to medium term.
How does the Archive usually cope with sites that have a flux of illegal content being posted and then removed by moderators? Trying to keep a "clean" archive of KF seems like far more effort than it's worth.
You could say that for any forum including Reddit and Twitter that have orders of magnitude more pulled content than a relatively small but edgy forum. And it’s not even clear KF has a huge problem with that since, for example, posts that threatened Keffals were two posts in a thread with 50k pages from sleeper accounts that were immediately deleted.
But it’s pretty useful to see now-deleted content when allegations come up. Maybe the archive should wait for the law.
The biggest issue with KF’s archive is how easily a motivated person was able to get it pulled especially at a time where the only option left was to take everyone’s word that the content said what it said.
The biggest issue with KF’s archive is how easily a motivated person was able to get it pulled especially at a time where the only option left was to take everyone’s word that the content said what it said.
Profit is the only principle that applies anymore. If it's more profitable to appear to be dedicated to free speech and the law, that's what companies will do. If it's more profitable to appeal to the angry mobs, that's what they'll do instead.
