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The Internet

How the Internet Archive is Waging War on Misinformation (ft.com) 73

Posted by msmash from the marching-forward dept.
San Francisco-based non-profit is archiving billions of web pages in a bid to preserve web history. From a report: Since the 2016 US election, as fears about the power of fake news have intensified, the archive has stepped up its efforts to combat misinformation. At a time when false and ultra-partisan content is rapidly created and spread, and social media pages are constantly updated, the importance of having an unalterable record of who said what, when has been magnified. "We're trying to put in a layer of accountability," said founder Brewster Kahle. Mr Kahle founded the archive, which now employs more than 100 staff and costs $18m a year to run, because he feared that what was appearing on the internet was not being saved and catalogued in the same way as newspapers and books. The organisation is funded through donations, grants and the fees it charges third parties that request specific digitisation services.

So far, the archive has catalogued 330bn web pages, 20m books and texts, 8.5m audio and video recordings, 3m images and 200,000 software programs. The most popular, public websites are prioritised, as are those that are commonly linked to. Some information is free to access, some is loaned out (if copyright laws apply) and some is only available to researchers. Curled up in a chair in his office after lunch, Mr Kahle lamented the combined impact of misinformation and how difficult it can be for ordinary people to access reliable sources of facts. "We're bringing up a generation that turns to their screens, without a library of information accessible via screens," said Mr Kahle. Some have taken advantage of this "new information system", he argued -- and the result is "Trump and Brexit." Having a free online library is crucial, said Mr Kahle, since "[the public is] just learning from whateverâ...âis easily available."
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How the Internet Archive is Waging War on Misinformation More

How the Internet Archive is Waging War on Misinformation

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  • robots.txt is retroactive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TypoNAM ( 695420 ) on Thursday September 19, 2019 @03:08PM (#59213772)
    Doesn't matter when robots.txt [ycombinator.com] is retroactive [archive.org]. It's annoying when crawl snapshots of dead sites on expired then bought-up domains' content aren't accessible due to changed robots.txt by the new domain owners. Lost a lot of useful information in old bookmarks because of this.

    So how is it any different now? Will they finally stop the retroactive bullshit?

  • What accountability? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fake news has been a stable of American history. See Tonkin incident in Vietnam to WMD in Iraq. Also I lol at causing $18m a year to run, I'd look at their accounting for accountability.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by spun ( 1352 )

      Comrade, the word you are looking for here is "staple." A stable is what a horse lives in.

    • Re:What accountability? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Thursday September 19, 2019 @03:26PM (#59213822)

      Fake news has been a stable of American history. See Tonkin incident in Vietnam to WMD in Iraq. Also I lol at causing $18m a year to run, I'd look at their accounting for accountability.

      Remember the Maine!

      Oh, you don't?

      We went to war with Spain over the explosion of the USS Maine while she was swinging at anchor in Havana Bay.

      The Truth was it was a coal bunker fire that set off a powder magazine.

      But, our press, our filthy traitor yellow press, said it was the Spaniards' fault, so to war we went. That yellow press was mostly owned by a guy called William Hearst and his competitor, Joseph Pulitzer. THAT Pulitzer.

      Think on that next time you people believe what CNN / MSNBC / WaPo / NYTimes / Vice / Motherboard / Buzzfeed / and that twat whose name I can't remember tells you.

      Fucking traitors they are, the lot of them.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      And FFS, it's STAPLE, not stable! Stable is where the horse lives.

      • So you get your news from "real" sources like Fox Propaganda, which is curiously missing from your list? Rupert Murdoch is as yellow a journalist as Hearst and Pulitzer ever were.

        • So you get your news from "real" sources like Fox Propaganda, which is curiously missing from your list? Rupert Murdoch is as yellow a journalist as Hearst and Pulitzer ever were.

          Hey, someone has to push back against CNN et al.

          Don't like it? Don't read it!

      • i think 'adjusted' news is the cornerstone of any government ... not exclusive to china or any of the other places blamed for it. The only government job i ever had was an office that did nothing but 'adjust' statements for press release ... to make sure the commas were right but also to make sure no one on the planet could take offense to any word used , so how much adjustment is fake ?

  • Thought Crime (Score:1, Informative)

    by Vinegar Joe ( 998110 )

    Some have taken advantage of this "new information system", he argued -- and the result is "Trump and Brexit."

    What a bunch of bullshit.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by spun ( 1352 )

      Everything about Trump and Brexit is bullshit, so could you be more specific?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by pgmrdlm ( 1642279 )
        God forbid that someone gives a shit about the sovereignty of their nation. Only ASSHOLES don't believe a nation should rule itself.

        • Re:Thought Crime (Score:4, Interesting)

          by spun ( 1352 ) <loverevolutionary&yahoo,com> on Thursday September 19, 2019 @04:17PM (#59214032) Journal

          Nations are a concept invented by humans. How is the relationship between the member states and the EU fundamentally any different from the US states and the federal government? It's fucking splitting hairs to say one is worthy of giving a shit about, while the other isn't. Too me, the major difference seems to be, the EU is fine letting idiots leave and fail on their own, while we here in the states will kill a fucker who tries that.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by U0K ( 6195040 )
            There are some historic differences of how the US and the EU came to be.

            In Europe pretty much everything is rooted in many centuries of history, in centuries of war against each other and so forth. As a result the feeling of unity and the EU identity is perhaps not as strong among the majority of people as it is in the US. For example if you go around in the EU and ask people with what they identify with (as far as nations and so forth go) you won't encounter a lot of people that state they're European or

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          Yep, America should be dissolved back to the sovereign States, stupid that they gave up their sovereignty and united.

    • Re:Thought Crime (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday September 19, 2019 @03:30PM (#59213840) Homepage Journal

      We know this to be true.

      In the case of brexit the crimes of Cambridge Analytica and the Vote Leave campaign are well documented. They abused Facebook data to target gullible people with misinformation and lies, such as the infamous one about Turkey joining the EU. They selected people they thought were unlikely to fact check and created personal bubbles for them.

      And that's before you get to the more general misinformation campaigns like the one Boris Johnson presided over.

      In Trump's case I think whatever side of the political spectrum you are on we can all at least agree that he has a strained relationship with the truth. In his case I'm not sure the Internet Archive can help that much - most of his based know that a lot of what he says is lies, but don't care. In the post-truth world they assume everyone lies all the time anyway.

      • I was going to say the same thing. There's an entire documentary about this exactly on Netflix, called "The Great Hack". Although I think Aaron Banks is threatening a lawsuit.

      • We know this to be true.

        So says the person that gaslights on /. about what a fine moral upstanding group Antifa is. "We" know that when it comes to politics, everything "true" according to some people is anything but.

        In Trump's case, he's a product of the environment where the norm is "ends justify the means" in pursuit of power and self enrichment. Therefore lying is to be expected in order to succeed, and Trumps own most devoted critics make sure that the soil of mistruth is very well fertilized with endless amounts of bullshit.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          So says the person that gaslights on /. about what a fine moral upstanding group Antifa is.

          I don't know why you think this. I should say that we don't even have many of them in the UK but the ones we do have mostly seem to be decent people, just opposed to fascists. In the US seems to be more of them willing to get into fights or vandalize stuff, which of course only hurts the cause.

          What I do find kinda funny is all the "commies everywhere" 1950s paranoia there is now. Someone was trying to tell me that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson where Communists the other day, right here on Slashdot. Meanwhi

          • Speaking of commies, I remember when the Russians were being blamed for Brexit too. Even right after the story of the Rotherham rape gangs and the police scandal was finally too great to be ignored by the press and there were too many whistleblowers that they couldn't all be punished or silenced. To create a Russian scapegoat to explain anti-EU sentiment really took a lot of chutzpah.

            And just like 2016 when almost the entirety of the media was negative against Trump, afterwards came the wise sages to say th

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Have you read the Mueller Report? Is he a Communist?

              • Mueller a communist? I'm probably more of a commie than that deep state operative is, and not even nearly as likely as a leftist living in San Fran who wants to usurp an unchecked authority of preserving historical record.

                I'm really glad for this article. To utter something so disingenuous as to say Trump and Brexit was only the result of devious misinformation campaigns, sets off a lot of alarm bells. Then for you to say "we know this to be true" was just the icing on the cake.

                If the Internet Archive is go

      • They abused Facebook data to target gullible people

        Things that had been pioneered by Obama years earlier. His campaign had its own social media program, complete with app and data collection. There are also various foreign entities doing the exact same things you complain about while pushing anti-Brexit propaganda. Yet the people who scream and whine about Trump and Brexit all day ignore these cases because it's "the right" ones doing it. You proclaim with absolute certainty to know what's "true". Thus ironically proving that "They selected people they th

      • We know this to be true.

        In the case of brexit the crimes of Cambridge Analytica and the Vote Leave campaign are well documented.

        Bollocks. Show me a single press publication which goes into detail on how Cambridge Analytica came to be and what were the assignments of its parent company SCL and the initial funding for it under the name of Behavioural Dynamics Institute. You are not going to find any. Guardian and all other newspapers avoid that topic like the plague.

        Do you want to know why? Because it was specifically created for perversion of democracy in Eastern Europe after the fall of the wall to ensure that the newly emergent

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        In the case of brexit the crimes of Cambridge Analytica and the Vote Leave campaign are well documented

        Comically although Vote Leave broke the law they were following guidance from the Electoral Commission, who have lost a case in court on exactly that matter.

        They also broke the law by overspending on their campaign, with the overspend resulting in them spending nonetheless substantially less than the Remain campaigns spent, so it's hard to argue that their breach led to a material impact.

        Meanwhile, multiple Remain campaigns broke the law. Perhaps you'd care to mention those too?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      I think it's actually true. The new information system permits access to a far greater spread of information. Some of it is fake but some of it is pointing out the misrepresentations of the media and people in positions of power.

      That's valuable and has led to a more informed populace, and is precisely why so many organisations are panicking and seeking to censor certain viewpoints. It's not because those viewpoints are less valid than others, it's because they don't conform with the mandated view.

  • Books (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Thursday September 19, 2019 @03:36PM (#59213850) Homepage
    One of the advantages of printed media is you can't update the existing print. You can do an updated printing of course. Both the boon and the bane of the internet is instantly update-able. That old inconvenient news can be whisked away.
    • I thought the same thing. How can they assert that the information in the archive is the original and not some "updated" version?

      • the only way short of putting it into print and then guarding the few remaining copies of the book.

        Digitally sign it with a timestamp. if the encryption gets weak, you need a simple process of re-signing so it's ALL double signed before the previous method is broken... and done all on the same day with a timestamp. then you only need to trust the signer that they didn't fake the date and resign it. but you have to trust the library over somebody who went and rebinded an altered copy of a book... or in the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skids ( 119237 )

        Cryptographic trusted timestamps. Which can be independently produced [bitcoinmagazine.com]. You can even make your own if you really don't trust whatever is available.

        Of course, would be nice to find an assuredly post-quantum algorithm.

    • Who is going to bother to verify, let alone even touch, an old "dead tree" format book to see if it differs from an online book. You can't even "diff" them! You have to actually read them side by side to compare. Or scan the dead tree book into a computer and correct errors.

      Is any of that worth doing just to show that someone is rewriting history in some sinister self serving way?
    • Indeed. And it is promptly updated to fit the narrative. When the Italian police published the Neo-Nazis stash of weapons recently it was extremely clear that the stash belonged to a group which fought on "our" side in Donbass against the Russians.

      You can look it up in the Internet archive (in italian)

      That did not fit the narrative and what the newspapers published under the wise direction of the Integrity Initiative so the police press release was promptly updated to ensure that it is ambiguous.

      http

  • Either you're an archive or you're not (Score:4, Informative)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Thursday September 19, 2019 @03:47PM (#59213898) Homepage

    Either you're an archive or you're not. No, you can't delete shit you don't like and still claim to be an "archive". I'll make a narrow exception for illegal stuff like child porn and warez, but "fake news" needs to be archived as well. Otherwise the likes of CNN won't make it into the index.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      Indeed, a key role archive.org and comparable sites play is demonstrating the fake news that was published, even where it has since been removed, hidden or (ideally) corrected.

      The New York Times have done this in just the past week, libelling a prominent member of the judiciary on hearsay while explicitly omitting key facts that negate their entire story. They added those facts only after the initial publicity was over, thus many people will never have seen them.

      It's a repeated pattern and sites like archiv

  • > "We're bringing up a generation that turns to their screens, without a library of information accessible via screens," said Mr Kahle. Some have taken advantage of this "new information system", he argued -- and the result is "Trump and Brexit."

    Thank goodness the person archiving the Internet isn't politically biased.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      unless he's manipulating what he's archiving, does his bias matter?
      i'm sure librarians have political bias as well (doesn't every person?).

  • The Internet Archive [archive.org] will host your ISOs of redistributable material, movies, texts, any kind of data in such a way that people can link directly to it. This makes IA totally compatible with the audio and video HTML5 elements and your audience doesn't have to visit a particular site to see/hear/read something, doesn't need a specialized viewer, or a specialized download program like youtube-dl [github.io] to get a copy of something; an ordinary right-click "Save link as..." will work. I'm grateful to all of the youtub

  • Curled up in a chair in his office after lunch, Mr Kahle lamented the combined impact of misinformation and how difficult it can be for ordinary people to access reliable sources of facts. "We're bringing up a generation that turns to their screens, without a library of information accessible via screens," said Mr Kahle. Some have taken advantage of this "new information system", he argued -- and the result is "Trump and Brexit."

    But I thought liberals think Internet Archive cannot be trusted because it can be fabricated [mediaite.com]?

  • Fake news is that which dares to speak ill of our Lord and Messiah, D*****d T***p.

    Real news is that which sings his praises.

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