, and fact-checking digital articles are part of a deeper, more important project to chronicle digital history and establish a record of facts.
Last month, the archive of press releases from a sitting member of Congress, New York’s Elise Stefanik, vanished after she came under scrutiny. The Wayback Machine documented this erasure and provided a time-stamped record of past versions of her website and press releases.
In 2018, a US Appeals court ruled that the Wayback Machine’s archive of webpages can be used as legitimate legal evidence.
The Internet Archive has countless examples of when the press have referenced the Wayback Machine to correct disinformation and dispel rumors. In one example from last year, the Associated Press relied accurate cleaned numbers list from frist database on the Wayback Machine to set the record that the CDC did not say the polio vaccine gave millions of Americans a “cancer virus.”
With the rise of AI-generated disinformation, there’s reason to believe such attempts at rewriting history (even if that history is just yesterday) will become more prevalent and the social contract that has governed web crawlers is coming to an end.
A citizen-powered web
Building digital archives is a bulwark against those attempting to rewrite history and spread misinformation. An archived, time-stamped webpage is not just unimpeachable evidence, it’s a foundational building block of a shared sense of reality.
In 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 went down over Ukraine, the Wayback Machine captured evidence that a pro-Russian group was behind the missile attack. But it wasn’t the Wayback Machine’s algorithms that captured the evidence by crawling the internet; it was an individual who found an obscure blog post from a Ukrainian separatist leader touting the shooting down of a plane. That individual identified the blogpost as important enough to be archived, and it became a critical piece of evidence, even after that post disappeared from the internet.
As Graham said, “You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. If you see something, save something.”
What pages can you help archive? Archive them with the Wayback Machine on Save Page Now.
Posted in Wayback Machine - Web Archive | Tagged Wayback Machine |
Fair Use in Action at the Internet Archive
Posted on March 1, 2024 by Lila Bailey
As we celebrate Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, we are reminded of all the ways these flexible copyright exceptions enable libraries to preserve materials and meet the needs of the communities they serve. Indeed, fair use is essential to the functioning of libraries, and underlies many of the ordinary library practices that we all take for granted. In this blog post, we wanted to describe a few of the ways the fair use doctrine has helped us build our library.
Fair use in action: Web Archives and the Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive has been archiving the web since the mid-1990’s. Our web collection now includes more than 850 billion web pages, with hundreds of millions added each day. The Wayback Machine is a free service that lets people visit these archived websites. Users can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the web.