U.K. Parties Prepare for 2015 by Erasing Web Histories

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-15/u-k-parties-prepare-for-2015-by-erasing-web-histories.html

by JumpCrisscross • 13 years ago

43 45 13 years ago

lignuist• 13 years ago

Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party confirmed a magazine report on Nov. 13 that it had removed from its website speeches that predated the party taking power in 2010, as well as placing markers on its site asking search engines to remove these from their archives.

The standard behavior of search engines in such cases should be to remove the entire website from the index. All or nothing.

richthegeek• 13 years ago

as well as placing markers on its site

I suspect what they mean is that requests for the files send an appropriate HTTP status code (e.g. 410 - Gone). This is standard practice on any website where something is no longer available and is used by search engines to spot dead links.

It's not a request to Google for censorship.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

You suspect wrong: They added a long list of URLs for their news archives to robots.txt:

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2013/11/co...

This does not just cause search engines to stop linking to it, but also causes all the main engines to remove it from publicly accessible caches, and causes Internet Archive to remove the pages as well.

arethuza2• 13 years ago

I'm delighted that my choco ration is going up to 25 grammes.

lutusp3• 13 years ago

I'm delighted that my choco ration is going up to 25 grammes.

I suspect that Americans, and those under 30, aren't going to understand this reference. As to those both American and under 30, well, they're double double plus unable to understand this reference.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

encephalogram• 13 years ago

You shouldn't have used "ultra plus" in that sentence. In the future, just use "double double plus" as it involves unplus words, and is double plus duckspeak.

lotsofcows• 13 years ago

Yes, because Americans and those under 30 don't read books.

Sambdala• 13 years ago

For what it's worth, most Americans under 30 have probably read 1984 in school.

grey-area• 13 years ago

Sorry, I had 1984 on my kindle, but Amazon deleted it.

johnchristopher• 13 years ago

I read that book in my teens but I do not remember anything related to choco ration. </forwhatitsworth>

spicerguy• 13 years ago

yes, I know exactly what you mean and this was my first thought as well.

midhir• 13 years ago

Ha! Double plus good!

mtgx• 13 years ago

I'm very disappointed in how archive.org handled this. I mean, they just delete all of their archives as soon as the source blocks archive.org or requests they delete its archives on them? Then what's the point of it all?!

pavlov• 13 years ago

What do you expect them to do? It's copyrighted material. They can't retain a copy if the author doesn't want them to.

sdoering• 13 years ago

Well and that is the problem with digital goods. In "the old days" (TM) it was, that libraries and library-archives had papers and reporting on these speeches and oftentimes even manuscripts of speeches archived.

I would have loved to see a political party, or a newspaper request libraries to delete their copies.

So, what is a digital archive other, then a library, our repository of shared human historic-source-files? Why do we make it that easy for anyone, to destroy things, that might be of interest to future historians/generations?

I strongly believe, that our day and age will be one of the least known to future generations, as so much of the digital artifacts will be lost without the smallest possibility, to recover any artifact of it.

And yes, it is copyrighted material, but was copyright ever conceived as a tool for history-mingling or censorship?

dingaling• 13 years ago

But the author hasn't expressed that sentiment to the Internet Archive; they've just requested that automated spiders no longer follow those links on their site.

As with the original poster, I'm uncertain as to why IA has decided this means 'purge all copies'.

tehwalrus4• 13 years ago

Glad to see the Lib Dems haven't been caught doing this (yet).

booyaa00• 13 years ago

Since Lib Dems won't win the next election, and will likely have their share of the vote severely reduced, I'm not sure anyone is really looking...

tehwalrus4• 13 years ago

sadly, you're probably right about our prospects. Since we're the only party (big enough to have MPs) who opposed the Digital Economy Act (and whose party policy is still to repeal it) I'm not sure this is a good thing...

csmuk2• 13 years ago

Well everyone's well aware of the promises they broke so there's no point in hiding it or it'll make them look even worse (if that is possible).

tehwalrus4• 13 years ago

well, if you want us to keep our promises you have to vote us in to a parliamentary majority. My frustration with how crap our MPs have been is still high, but they do have a reasonable (ish) excuse.

rjknight• 13 years ago

"Removed" makes it sound like a sin of commission, where it's more likely that they decided to re-build their website and didn't see a point in having a historical archive of speeches, policy documents etc. on there. To the extent that political parties are marketing operations rather than history societies, this is not really surprising.

I'm not sure how this kind of thing used to be handled prior to the web being a major campaign tool. I wonder how easy it was to get hold of the 1992 Labour election manifesto in 1997, when such things existed only as printed documents.

There has always been a thriving cottage industry of political obsessives (in a good way!) who maintain their own archives of this kind of material. It turns out that you can't get old election manifestos from the Labour party, but you can get them here: http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/ - and the Conservative one here: http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1992/

I'm not sure what's best here. Should we put greater pressure on political parties (and other similar organisations) to maintain a public history of their own activity despite this being sometimes against their self-interest, or should we support the efforts of third parties who archive this stuff without such conflicts of interest? (Of course, the right answer might be "both").

choult2• 13 years ago

I believe the Conservatives (at least) have also disallowed the relevant paths via their robots.txt: http://www.conservatives.com/robots.txt

This then has the effect of removing it from the Internet Archive for a start...

eliasmacpherson• 13 years ago

That is a shame. To my knowledge, no party or politician has ever changed tack after being challenged on the basis that they are contradicting their election promises. But there's something eerily Orwellian about this, we have always been at war with Eurasia.

https://archive.org/about/exclude.php

"The Internet Archive is not interested in offering access to web sites or other Internet documents whose authors do not want their materials in the collection."

peteretep• 13 years ago

Kind of makes sense too - you don't want people searching for Conservative policies at election time accidentally finding the ones with the pressing issues for the last election.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

They didn't just remove it. They explicitly added these pages to robots.txt, causing their removal from Internet Archive too.

cs02rm0• 13 years ago

Seems like a sensible move to tell crawlers there isn't a page there so don't bother trying to index it. Probably keeps their logs cleaner and reduces the requests they have to serve.

I find it slightly odd that the internet archive then drop historical pages, but the jump some are making to this being Orwellian I find a leap too far.

arethuza2• 13 years ago

That does look interesting, but in general, what is there that allows me to check the authenticity and integrity of those and other "important" online documents?

marrs• 13 years ago

Maybe we need to think more carefully about how we archive historical data online. After all, suppose someone "discovers" an old manifesto that reveals something controversial: without proof that the content hasn't been altered since it was captured, the content has no validity whatsoever.

And taking this to its natural conclusion, a malicious opponent could fake archive data in order to gain an advantage.

hrnnnnnn• 13 years ago

"Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it." - George Orwell, 1984

casca• 13 years ago

This is a very strange action. It's almost as if they thought that some simple technical tricks could remove things from the Internet. Now there will be even more interest in comparing what they've said in the past with what is said in the future, and other organisations - now familiar with the Wayback Machine policy will keep mirrors.

As a quick fix, the wonderful British Library has a service called www.webarchive.org.uk. Here are some speeches from 2008 : http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20081209103831/...

They also seem to have done something with their YT channel. For example, this video is dated Mar 21, 2007, but when viewing the channel and sorting by oldest first, it's not there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbPpcuh7DF8

bendtheblock• 13 years ago

Streisand effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

SilkRoadie• 13 years ago

Such is the nature of politics. I don't know what politics are like elsewhere but in Britain it goes something like this..

At Prime Ministers Questions.

Opposition: Another bank scandal, not doing enough, blah blah blah

PM: ignores question Well the hypocrasy, in 2009 opposition was shaking hands with these people. In 2005 you praised the banks blah blah nonsense blah.

In UK politics any position you take today is used as a weapon against you tomorrow. This is my understanding of why things are being deleted.

Take the conservatives. Before the banking crisis they wanted to match Labour spending. On crime they wanted to hug a hoodie.. now they believe in Austerity, blame Labour party for the financial problems and are tough on crime. Turns out that the world changes and so do policies and I guess this drastic step is to reduce the ammount of ammunition each other have.

I am not sure it matters that they are deleted. Surely the websites of political parties should reflect the policies of today. It is up to historians, archivists and the media to note and store the speeches of yesterday.

dspillett• 13 years ago

In UK politics any position you take today is used as a weapon against you tomorrow.

As it damn well should be. If I'm voting for a person or party on the basis of some promise they are making about a given policy or a claim that they have an understanding/capability of something, I want to be able to see their history of keeping (or not) said promised and proving (or now) their actual understanding/capability.

Someone who has a history of being badly wrong and/or not keeping their word is someone I'm less likely to trust. That'll be the majority of current politicians (ours and those in other countries). I don't consider this position to be at all unreasonable. Someone who actively hides that they were wrong in the past, and/or made promises that have since not been kept, is someone I trust even less.

Removing the content from their site to replace it with up-to-date positions I'm OK with, we understand it is a fluffy promotion site rather than a library of meaningful and historically accurate information anyway, but actively working to have the old content removed from other archives is simply not on IMO.

HarrietJones• 13 years ago

It took me two minutes to find a speech from Gordon Brown on the labour UK website:

http://www.labour.org.uk/gordon_brown_conference

Saying "The opposition Labour Party has eliminated all news items from before Ed Miliband was elected its leader in September 2010 from its website." seems a little strong.

knapp• 13 years ago

By no means comprehensive but there are several speeches archived on this site, set up by academics at Swansea University: http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm

U.K. Parties Prepare for 2015 by Erasing Web Histories

Related Stories