Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is an "online library" containing various public domain and Creative Commons downloads with culture being the primary focus. Early 78 RPM records,^[1] Grateful Dead concerts,^[2] and the Wayback Machine are notable features of the site. Internet Archive currently does not work on Internet Explorer. There is another web page archival service named archive.is, although it does not display the web pages as accurately as the Internet Archive would.

Liberal bias

Although Internet Archive presents itself as non-partisan, the website has a subtle liberal bias, which is already evident from their affiliation with Wikipedia.

On November 29, 2016, the website's founder Brewster Kahle made a blog post asking its viewers to help keep their website free, accessible, and private. Although the headline is sensible, one paragraph mentions that on November 9, 2016, people have woken up to a "new administration promising radical change," obviously referring to Donald Trump. In the following paragraph, Kahle adds on to this statement by saying that they need to keep their materials accessible as well as private, and he cited government surveillance.^[3]

On January 6, 2017, the Internet Archive launched the "Trump Archive," announced by Nancy Watzman in a blog post. Despite its name, the collection was made to put Trump in a negative light. The Trump Archive consists of clips of mainstream media sources (such as ABC and CNN) to fact check Trump's statements. It openly invites Wikipedians to use the resources. The blog mentions that the archive is an experimental model for creating archives for other public officials. However, they did go on to mention that would do the same for other politicians, regardless of party affiliation.^[4] As of 2021, their only sub-collections under the Executive Branch Archive (of which the Trump Archive is a sub-collection) is of Republican politicians, but using clips from mainstream media sources (including Fox) rather than raw footage. This suggests that Internet Archive is quietly working on historical revisionism to influence future generations.^[5]

On October 30, 2020, another employee of the Internet Archive, Mark Graham, announced that they would implement a fact checker within the Wayback Machine to point out issues about "false and misleading information," which makes their goal to revise history more evident, and the phrase discouraged people from thinking for themselves. The first photograph in the blog uses a CNN article from May 1, 2017 titled "What the GOP health care bill really says about pre-existing conditions." It displays a small, yellow notice saying that Politifact has fact checked the article. However, it also posted unique context on a Medium article that was removed. At the end of the blog post, the Internet Archive thanked the following organizations, including from fake news sources: FactCheck.org, Check Your Fact, Lead Stories, Politifact, Washington Post Fact-Checker, AP News Fact Check, USA Today Fact Check, Graphika, Stanford Internet Observatory, and Our.news.^[6]

Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive operates the Wayback Machine, a caching service. Named after a recurring segment of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon,^[7] the Wayback Machine stores copies of Internet sites indexed by date. A Web site owner may opt-out of this caching through use of a "robots.txt" file or by request.^[7]

The Wayback Machine has been used by all types of people, regardless of their party affiliation. The Wayback Machine has been used in the past to expose the past activity of politicians, including issues relating to 9/11 conspiracy theories, Barack Obama's involvement with a socialist political party,^[8]^[9] and the Barack Obama birthplace controversy.^[10]

Liberal bias

Wayback Machine

External links

References

Conservapedia