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By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

nytimes.com

51–60 of 168 posts

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#51

This is a digital content issue, not so much an issue of extremist content. Almost 10 years ago now, Geocities was shut down and took 38 million of the most popular pages of the Internet 1.0 with it.

Wasn’t there an attempt, neocities, to bring back the aesthetic?

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#52
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even something more distributed. Like each public library has a storage cube and each cube has an overlapping portion of history. They checksum each other peer-to-peer to detect anyone trying to change history. There are 110,000 public libraries in the United States. Plus thousands more private libraries. Seems like enough for U.S. history, at least.

Shouldn't be the public libraries though. Public libraries will not save certain videos. Especially if the local police or the guys in the blue windbreakers with three yellow letters on them show up. Maybe that's a problem that everyone has? But it would be best if there was some offshore, FBI proof, kind of way to do this archiving.

Especially if the local police or the guys in the blue windbreakers with three yellow letters on them show up.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. After 9/11, the libraries were the first to stand up to the government's desperate search for information. The feds wanted everyone's lending history, and ended up backing off when the libraries put up a fight.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#53

As far as I'm aware, knowingly destroying evidence of a crime is illegal. So would this be illegal also?

Do they actually delete the files? Or do they just remove public access to them, but keep them on their servers? Maybe they send the data to law enforcement automatically? (I've heard that they do that for child pornography; maybe they do, or could do, the same for terrorist material as well.)

This.

It's naive to think these videos are deleted. Homeland Security shows up and YouTube has no problems giving them the videos. (They probably have an entirely separate search interface that does nothing but surface that extremist content for the Feds. So Homeland Security probably doesn't even have to leave their office.)

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#54

This is a digital content issue, not so much an issue of extremist content. Almost 10 years ago now, Geocities was shut down and took 38 million of the most popular pages of the Internet 1.0 with it.

Wasn’t there an attempt, neocities, to bring back the aesthetic?

The aesthetic is one thing, the content is another. The former is easy to replace, the latter irreplaceable.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed a month or two ago that certain sites seem to be excluded even from internet archives like the Wayback Machine. The first example I stumbled on was Snopes. I only noticed because I saw a Snopes link on Reddit where the thumbnail was clearly different from the live version; the thumbnail appeared to show a human-like baby in the womb, whereas the live version had that edited out. Example: https://web.archive…

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine." To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

This is how it works, yes.

----> Why isn't the site I'm looking for in the archive?

Some sites may not be included because the automated crawlers were unaware of their existence at the time of the crawl. It's also possible that some sites were not archived because they were password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or otherwise inaccessible to our automated systems. Site owners might have also requested that their sites be excluded from the Wayback Machine.

----> How can I exclude or remove my site's pages from the Wayback Machine?

You can send an email request for us to review to info@archive.org with the URL (web address) in the text of your message.

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004651732-Usin...

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#56

This is a digital content issue, not so much an issue of extremist content. Almost 10 years ago now, Geocities was shut down and took 38 million of the most popular pages of the Internet 1.0 with it.

Wasn’t there an attempt, neocities, to bring back the aesthetic?

I believe so, yeah, and there's an archive out there. But only because the site itself was so massive and notice was given that the end was coming, was the data saved.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#57
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed a month or two ago that certain sites seem to be excluded even from internet archives like the Wayback Machine. The first example I stumbled on was Snopes. I only noticed because I saw a Snopes link on Reddit where the thumbnail was clearly different from the live version; the thumbnail appeared to show a human-like baby in the womb, whereas the live version had that edited out. Example: https://web.archive…

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine." To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

Not only that, if they are archived at one point and later decide to be excluded then all of the archives for that domain are deleted retroactively. This means that a valuable site can be archived for years but if the domain lapses and gets bought up by somebody who decides to exclude the Wayback Machine then all of that precious content is destroyed even though the destroyer never owned it!

I feel like we’re in the Internet equivalent of the early years of Hollywood. We’ve lost so many precious early movies because there were no backups of the film.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#58
post #35

YouTube could solve this problem by throwing money at it, i.e. investing much more heavily in human moderators. They are extremely unlikely to ever do so, as the market would punish them for it in the short term and Google is unlikely to prioritize human rights over revenue. This presents an opportunity for another Internet Archive-like repo as mentioned in earlier comments. Unfortunately the barrier to entry (just g…

Isn't it well documented that the human moderators who do exist at places like facebook and youtube end up having their mental health screwed after they watch so much disturbing content? Just throwing human moderators at the problem probably has more cost than just the salaries involved.

I am well aware that human moderators are currently treated like crap by Big Tech, and that their mental health is suffering as a result. When I say "throw more money at the problem", I mean, hire a lot more of them, and treat them all better.

The alternatives are

1. Algorithms, which always going to fail in human rights type "edge cases" like the ones described in the article, and which really shouldn't be seen as edge cases IMO, or

2. Bury your head in the sand and allow terrible content to exist.

Do you have any better ideas for how to deal with processing traumatic content at scale?

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#59
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine." To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

Not only that, if they are archived at one point and later decide to be excluded then all of the archives for that domain are deleted retroactively. This means that a valuable site can be archived for years but if the domain lapses and gets bought up by somebody who decides to exclude the Wayback Machine then all of that precious content is destroyed even though the destroyer never owned it! I feel like we’re in the…

I don't think your interpretation of the latter case is quite right. In my understanding, the Archive is willing to disable display of the site content retroactively due to a new robots.txt, but they won't delete that content. It will still be present in their files.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#60
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine." To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

Not only that, if they are archived at one point and later decide to be excluded then all of the archives for that domain are deleted retroactively. This means that a valuable site can be archived for years but if the domain lapses and gets bought up by somebody who decides to exclude the Wayback Machine then all of that precious content is destroyed even though the destroyer never owned it! I feel like we’re in the…

Deleted or not made available?
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