*Yes, it's rotting. "Internet Archive," ever talk to those guys? What a strange enterprise.
*I can remember people telling me that if you tossed some data onto "the Internet" it would be there forever, but smartphone video uploaded for the Big Tech majors sure isn't "the Internet."
*I wish I had an archive of articles in which pundits suddenly discover the perils of bit-rot. I could fill printed volumes with that.
Least of all, Buzzfeed, but what the heck
by Evan Hill
(...)
As time passes, I fear that more and more of what happened in those days will live only in memory. The internet has slowly unraveled since 2011: Image-hosting sites went out of business, link shorteners shut down, tweets got deleted, and YouTube accounts were shuttered. One broken link at a time, one of the most heavily documented historical events of the social media era could fade away before our eyes.
It’s the paradox of the internet age: Smartphones and social media have created an archive of publicly available information unlike any in human history — an ocean of eyewitness testimony. But while we create almost everything on the internet, we control almost none of it.
In the summer of 2017, observers of the Syrian Civil War realized that YouTube was removing dozens of channels and tens of thousands of videos documenting the conflict. The deletions occurred after YouTube announced that it had deployed “cutting-edge machine learning technology … to identify and remove violent extremism and terrorism-related content.” But the machines went too far.
“What’s disappearing in front of our eyes is the history of this terrible war,” Chris Woods, the director of the reporting and advocacy organization Airwars, said at the time. Not only were the deleted videos a resource for journalists and a public chronicle of the violence, they were potential evidence for war crimes trials. YouTube restored most of the channels following the outcry but has continued to delete footage at a slower pace — about 200,000 videos of the conflict have been memory-holed, observers estimated in March.
Our access to information is incredibly broad but shockingly fleeting. A tweet that was meant to be forgotten within minutes resurfaces years later to cost someone their job, while a video providing unambiguous evidence of war crimes disappears without a trace. A handful of enormous tech companies curate the public library we conjure into existence every day, and they can and do delete it at a whim....
