Re: They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

D. Ray <d@ray> writes:

> Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite
> ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has
> been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for
> sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over
> content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in
> favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content
> survive to see the light of day. 
>
> It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a
> range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the
> Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million
> views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it
> hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that
> disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the
> platform X to post all three hours. 
>
> Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part
> of the business model of alternative media. 
>
> Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are
> technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability
> of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly,
> the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking
> images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have
> gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has
> chronicled the life of the Internet in real time. 
>
> As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted
> for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and
> consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about
> partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are
> being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole
> memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now. 
>
> The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was
> suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only
> took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it
> out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a
> read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content
> that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public
> display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet. 
>
> In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors
> content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the
> invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the
> ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of
> researchers looking into government and corporate actions. 
>
> It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers
> to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration
> systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all
> later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the
> only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the
> World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which
> was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks
> only to this tool which is now disabled. 
>
> What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and
> take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some
> user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to
> verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and
> when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being
> censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths
> of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry
> can get away with anything and not get caught. 
>
> We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a
> coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We
> just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines?
> Here is what they say:
>
>> Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email
>> addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website
>> javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and
>> improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and
>> we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires
>> heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We
>> apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
>
> Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the
> effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history
> fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has
> clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future
> of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed
> through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant
> authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector,
> technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from
> the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
>
> To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback
> Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have
> continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as
> services are secured.”
>
> When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be
> some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing
> behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in
> read-only mode now. It is not.
>
> Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one
> place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you
> were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space
> to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact,
> the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the
> Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
>
> Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet
> disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th
> election.
>
> Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results
> increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives.
> The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by
> user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less
> organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a
> search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found
> a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very
> different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers
> “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
>
> Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based
> on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that
> created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon.
> That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition
> seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of
> status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article
> somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it
> was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one
> particularly cared.
>
> This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system
> worked as well as one could possibly expect.
>
> Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did
> a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device)
> with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would
> find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about
> Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired
> years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming
> overlap.
>
> Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web
> ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do
> anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark. 
>
> No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it
> was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out
> the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high
> prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
>
> All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered
> individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our
> information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of
> 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly
> accelerated these trends. 
>
> One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and
> hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more
> memory. 
>
> As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been
> archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And
> we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible
> that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take
> recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
>
>
> The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require
> herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something
> else is quickly replacing it.
>
> <https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/>
>
> <https://archive.md/PlFOX>

Perhaps it would be good idea to start mirroring important content to
the Usenet and other platforms.