Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

http://blog.archive.org/2020/10/30/fact-checks-and-context-for-wayback-machine-pages/

by bjeds • 6 years ago

54 37 6 years ago

blog.archive.org

dgrin91• 6 years ago

This stuff makes me REALLY nervous. Its one thing to have a discussion about the here and now and debate what is true or not. There are plenty of very good fact checkers to help with this.

Wayback though is now going back and promoting a chosen context. History should be preserved for its integrity. If someone said something false let it stand on its own feet. Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true.

They say that victors write history, but that shouldn't be the goal.

taxicab2• 6 years ago

Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true

That is literally what they are doing. They are literally linking to context and other articles.

People can make up their own minds about Wayback Machine's content. They added even more information to help make up your mind on content that expresses a contentious opinion. That super helpful since I want to see as many sides as possible! Why would you want to censor that context unless you want to manipulate people into believe blatantly false misinformation?

rayiner• 6 years ago

Because the “context” is never fairly applied. I want a little bubble that lights up every time a Democrat says we’re cutting school funding and teachers are under paid. It would just be a chart showing that school funding has tripled since I was a kid and showing American teachers are paid higher than the OECD average. This is a bread-and-butter Democrat assertion that’s made literally everywhere, but fact checkers never add that “context.”

zorpner• 6 years ago

The lesson of the past ten years should be that most people are incapable of looking at the content and context and deciding on their own if it is true, and additionally are being subjected to a constant barrage of paid-for (whether by advertisers, corporate interests, or state actors) psychologically manipulative content.

I'm unsure about this and I don't know the answer -- but it's definitely not Present All Things As If They Were Equally Valid.

vorpalhex3• 6 years ago

Ah yes we should make sure we tell people The Truth, with warnings on Not Truth, such that they don't make Wrong Decisions.

The next step will be to "sanitize" Wrong Think from the archive, lest some poor easily convinced soul be led to it.

csnover5• 6 years ago

Adding context and giving suggestions for additional material is something librarians and museum curators have done probably since the dawn of the profession, and it’s all I can see happening here. I’m really struggling with your take that this is somehow a new or bad development.

Have you ever been to a library and asked for help finding something and received a suggestion that if you are looking to read X, you might also want to read Y? Have you ever been to a museum and seen a placard next to an object describing its historical significance? How is this somehow different? Because it’s “on the internet”?

IA is not compelling anyone to click on the link to PolitiFact, or the link to the report on foreign interference, or the link to the Medium content policy. They aren’t deleting or rewriting the content of the page. They’re attaching a link.

Do you think that a book or a documentary destroys the “integrity” of the original material by adding a non-destructive narration or voice over that offers extra context?

How could someone can even do what you want, to “look at the content and context”, if IA doesn’t provide any context?

SpicyLemonZest3• 6 years ago

I've been to libraries that offer context, recommendations, etc, but that doesn't seem like a very close analogy here. I've never seen a library book with a warning on the cover saying the librarians think it contains false claims, and if a library did apply such labels I'd be worried about how willing they are to continue stocking those books.

Von_Lipwig• 6 years ago

Who asked for this?

glerk• 6 years ago

Politically motivated organizations.

octoberfranklin• 6 years ago

China.

Duwensatzaj• 6 years ago

Those who in their hearts dream themselves our masters - https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE

guidovranken• 6 years ago

I think I've seen this movie before. You better start grabbing from the archive what you don't want to be lost forever.

drummer2• 6 years ago

You are right. It looks like we won't be enjoying freedoms (of speech) on archive.org for much longer.

vorpalhex3• 6 years ago

archivebox is a self hosted wayback machine that is easy to setup and very robust.

https://archivebox.io/

thysultan• 6 years ago

It's all down hill from here!

ffpip• 6 years ago

We all know how this is going to end up. It always starts with fact checking and then moves on to removing articles that are wrong.

wombatmobile• 6 years ago

In between now and that end point, it is neither one beast nor another. It is a partially flag corpus in which some articles are meta labelled for fact checking and some aren't.

Who gets to choose which articles are scrutinised and which aren't?

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

It seems that the leadership of archive.org is completely broken. First was the stupid stunt of saying they were a library and lending out unlimited digital copies, when it was pretty obvious that doing that would lead to huge copyright issues. Now it is this, moving them from being just an archiver of information to a commenter on information as well as an archiver and jumping headfirst into the culture wars.

I don’t want archive.org to be an exciting organization. I want it to be a boring organization that just archives as much of the internet as they can plausibly can.

It seems that current leadership is not content with being that.

drummer2• 6 years ago

The leadership could have been compromised in some way.

Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

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