D. Ray
2024-11-04 08:53:53 UTC
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Permalinkongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has
been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for
sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over
content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in
favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content
survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a
range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the
Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million
views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it
hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that
disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the
platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part
of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. 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.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was
suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only
took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it
out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a
read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content
that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public
display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors
content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the
invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the
ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of
researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers
to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration
systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all
later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the
only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the
World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which
was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks
only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and
take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some
user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to
verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and
when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being
censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths
of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry
can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a
coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We
just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines?
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email
addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website
javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and
improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and
we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires
heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We
apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but theaddresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website
javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and
improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and
we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires
heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We
apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history
fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has
clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future
of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed
through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant
authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector,
technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from
the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback
Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have
continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as
services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be
some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing
behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in
read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one
place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you
were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space
to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact,
the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the
Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet
disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th
election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results
increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives.
The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by
user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less
organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a
search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found
a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very
different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers
“trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based
on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that
created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon.
That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition
seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of
status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article
somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it
was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one
particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system
worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did
a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device)
with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would
find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about
Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired
years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming
overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web
ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do
anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it
was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out
the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high
prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered
individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our
information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of
2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly
accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and
hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more
memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been
archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And
we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible
that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take
recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require
herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something
else is quickly replacing it.
<https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/>
<https://archive.md/PlFOX>