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Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

chinamediaproject.org

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Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#31

Post by Cheer2171 »

anonzzzies wrote: post #30
Cheer2171 wrote: post #29

There are a few commenters in this thread making blatant false equivalence with the Western internet. This post is about how on major search engines in China, you now set the years to 1998-2005 and search for a non-controversial celebrity and you get zero search results from content actually published in that era. The loss of the early web due to web hosters not maintaining their own hosting and moving to walled gard…

Yep... Only archive.org has it sometimes and then you need to search there because you won't find it via others.

But for the Western internet, it disappears because the people hosting those websites gave up, so all we have is archive.org. With this case, there appears to be a government-level purge.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#32

Post by actionfromafar »

wumeow wrote: post #25

> Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.”

He will be educated.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#33

Post by lostemptations5 »

Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings.

Unfortunately alot of it from the article seems typical: blogs going off line as bloggers move to new technolgoies, social media companies going defunct or just not keeping old content.

Alot of these things can happen in the west. Remember these books you could read? "The Feynman Letters", etc. I'm paraphrasing-- but its impossible now.

Think of this: emails? A person dies and their laptop dies or is disposed of -- they're all gone. In the past the physicality of the letters would persist. Not so now. All this correspondence vanishes.

Facebook, are you kidding me? If someone famous thought to export their data -- and it can be found on a laptop still working (and you have the login password), then maybe. See above. This repeats and repeats for each system we interact with for communication.

Aside from the laptop scenario-- all this is lost. We live now in a blackhole of historical details of information, and soon to be replaced by a fabricated history hallucinated by LLMs perhaps.

Those that love historical understanding should be very worried.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#34

Post by asdasdsddd »

lelandfe wrote: post #7

> Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024). [..] Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021 US Google: About 2,580,000 results A pretty remarkable scrubbing of history.

There's pretty much nothing in that time range on Baidu, I looked up Mao, George Washington, Yue fei (a popular chinese folk hero), Garlic bread, etc.

But without the time filter, theres millions of search results.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#35

Post by ccgreg »

prophesi wrote: post #15
Arnavion wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/search?q=jack+ma&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min... First result for me is https://www.scb.co.th/en/personal-banking/stories/business-m... which Google thinks is from 2003-03-15, except it mentions COVID-19 so it obviously isn't. Second result is https://www.instagram.com/jack_overpower/feed/ which Google thinks is from 2001-01-02, except Instagram didn't exist at that time. It might have pictures from 20…

Yep; there may be a lack of incentive to preserve old sites, but what's worse are the ranking algorithms that prevent their discoverability in the first place.

Both the Internet Archive and Common Crawl have tools that reveal actual crawl dates. Search engines are not really intended to be archives, so it's no surprise that they aren't very good archives.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#36

Post by ccgreg »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #31
anonzzzies wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep... Only archive.org has it sometimes and then you need to search there because you won't find it via others.

But for the Western internet, it disappears because the people hosting those websites gave up, so all we have is archive.org. With this case, there appears to be a government-level purge.

The western Internet has a bunch of government archives, in addition to the Internet Archive and Common Crawl.

Many of the government archives are not public for copyright reasons.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#38

Post by Cheer2171 »

lostemptations5 wrote: post #33

Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Unfortunately alot of it from the article seems typical: blogs going off line as bloggers move to new technolgoies, social media companies going defunct or just not keeping old content. Alot of these things can happen in the west. Remember these books you could read? "The Fe…

Another false equivalence. "Intentionally or not" actually really matters here. It took work to maintain archives in the pre-digital era, and it takes work to maintain archives in the digital era. So many of those physical letters were lost, rotted, burned, etc.

This is a purge, not a failure to maintain archives. This is like when during the Cultural Revolution, they literally burned archives and letters by intellectuals.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#39

Post by Cheer2171 »

tehjoker wrote: post #37

[flagged]

Another false equivalence, not at all the same as in the West. This is government censorship scrubbing all search results from pre-2005. That Google update made it harder to search for groups that had put out misinformation and scammy SEO stuff, like googlebombing ("miserable failure" returns George W. Bush). Performing editorial or curatorial work is not in any way the same as a purge.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#40

Post by Ylpertnodi »

Arnavion wrote: post #12
lelandfe wrote: post #7

> Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024). [..] Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021 US Google: About 2,580,000 results A pretty remarkable scrubbing of history.

https://www.google.com/search?q=jack+ma&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min... First result for me is https://www.scb.co.th/en/personal-banking/stories/business-m... which Google thinks is from 2003-03-15, except it mentions COVID-19 so it obviously isn't. Second result is https://www.instagram.com/jack_overpower/feed/ which Google thinks is from 2001-01-02, except Instagram didn't exist at that time. It might have pictures from 20…

>except it mentions COVID-19 so it obviously isn't.

Perhaps it was just updated?

I generally ignore/ get annoyed by articles that don't have a date/ updated on, on the byline.

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