The Tory party in England is erasing all of their previous speeches from the internet

[thewayne]

"The Conservative Party have attempted to delete all their speeches and press releases online from the past 10 years, including one in which David Cameron promises to use the Internet to make politicians 'more accountable'. The Tory party have deleted the backlog of speeches from the main website and the Internet Archive — which aims to make a permanent record of websites and their content — between 2000 and May 2010."

http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/11/13/1734213/britains-conservatives-scrub-speeches-from-the-internet

Apparently if you buy a domain that was previously archived by the Internet Archive and change the robots.txt file to block archiving, the IA deletes all of the previous scans. Also apparently the Canadians under Harper are doing a similar thing. There are still archives if one knows where to look, but it will make fact-checking previous claims and promises more difficult.

How long until American politicians start practicing unspeaking?

Comments

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

Bleh. Something else to be depressed about.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The world is not a bad place, that is until you scratch below the surface and look at the meta organization above it.

[silveradept]

Already are doing so, and insisting, as Rand Paul does, I believe, that things on tape never happened.

I am very surprised that the IA deletes all archives instead of just stopping archiving from that point forward.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, apparently the IA doesn't watch when domains go dark, then go online again, that the ownership has changed and proceeds to honor the new robots.txt file and purges the previous contents. Fortunately national archives, papers, universities, etc., are not going to delete political speeches and such.

[silveradept]

True, but part of archives being useful is for the thing in question to be findable, and academics and libraries often think of structures for discovery that make sense to them, even if they don't make sense to non-academics. When you're looking to fact-check, archive-sifting is not something you want to have to spend a long time on. And if a claim was only made on a website, then down the Memory Hole it goes.