What happens when the Internet Archive gets erased?

History is always written by the winners. It’s just the nature of the game. The conquerors speak highly of themselves while the conquered don’t get any press. The Internet, however, has made a case for the opposite – a history where all sides of the story are covered, first hand. Unfortunately, theory and practice don’t always match up.

Although the Internet has made it easier for everyone to share their story, it doesn’t mean that information can’t be erased.

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit that saves old copies of webpages and other digital information, in a blog post yesterday, explained that it received more than 550 takedown notices from the European Union in the past week “falsely identifying hundreds of URLs on archive.org as ‘terrorist propaganda’.”

The notices came from Europol’s European Union Internet Referral Unit (or EU IRU) and its French counterpart. They included URLs for major collection pages, each containing millions of items (e.g., “https://archive.org/details/texts” and “https://archive.org/details/television”) as well as links to scientific research and US government reports, including TV footage from CSPAN.

James Vincent, The Verge
Up Next:

AI in Marketing: 5 Ways that Deepfakes will actually bring good into the world

AI in Marketing: 5 Ways that Deepfakes will actually bring good into the world