The moral, social and political rot that is engulfing America is everywhere and coming from multiple sources, corrupt, for-profit capitalism, corrupt authoritarian politics and corrupt theocratic Christian nationalism. It's complicated and messy, but very real, very now, and very much in power.
Gadget Review reports that major news sites are now blocking public access to the Way Back machine because they cannot monetize that content. They don't want AI to scrape their stuff to train AI without payment. It is now hard or impossible to track down deleted tweets or verify what a website actually said recently or years ago. For three decades, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was a free public digital time machine. It preserved hundreds of billions web pages. This tool was the only public archive of its scale. Major media outlets are now systematically blocking their content because they don't want it to be available to train AI competitors. And as an added bonus, they probably don't mind hiding their mistakes or embarrassing biases.
Publishers justify blocking with at least two arguments, (1) preventing AI companies from training on their archived content, and (2) general anti-scraping concerns. For example, the NYT says that access to its archived content violates copyright law. As usual, details of that are as clear as snorkeling in mud. So, access to an increasing amount of digital history is dying. Common sense (and others) says that blocking the Internet Archive will not meaningfully stop AI, but it will make it easier to rewrite history and harder to hold liars accountable.
The archive is at this link: https://web.archive.org/.
Q1: Is it reasonable to expect bad‑faith sites, e.g., MAGA propaganda mills, crackpot conspiracy blogs, and reputation‑laundering operations, to either block archiving or pressure hosts to do so to make their worst content harder to expose?
Q2: Is this colossal stupidity (maybe an irreversible mistake) by the panicking MSM because they are doomed by capitalism combined with for-profit driven executives and the human condition that generally likes entertainment and generally dislikes serious, evidence and reasoned-based content?
