Internet Archive is censoring archived content

submitted by sproketboy from youtube.com

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[–]gof-urself2 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's owned by Amazon(NSA)

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

My canaries in the coal mine are for internet archive censoring in a big way are alt-right folk music and Hitler speeches.

You Know I'm Right: https://archive.org/details/byrondelavandal/You+Know+I'm+Right+-+Byron+de+la+Vandal.mp4

Man Who Fought the Banks: https://archive.org/details/AdolfHitlerTheManWhoFoughtTheBank_201712

Seem to be still around for the moment.

[–]cheweh 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

These people seem well intentioned but are not technically savvy. I think they are confused.
The 404 page which IA is showing is a Medium 404 page. Therefore these people are claiming that the IA not only censors by briefly showing the censored material, but then by injecting a redirect to a fabricated 404 page under a false name. This ought to be obviously not the case.

To test what was happening I had to type the link in question from the video. It would have been nice for them to have included it in their description: web.archive.org/web/*/https://medium.com/@communismkills/here-are-the-companies-that-support-antifa-black-lives-matter-and-want-you-dead-1d79b1845f59

I got the same result, fine. So I clicked on one of the articles linked from the 404 page about mugs and cats (not censorship worthy). Immediately there were three odd redirects where the wayback machine complained of "301" or "302" or something before ending at a page. So right away it looks like the wayback machine webpage parser has troublesome, quirky behavior with medium's odd framework.

I went to the first article I could search for (looked for "medium ai article" and found a link formatted similar to the one in question) and it is some bland technology blog post which ALSO has the same 404 behavior:
https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet-5e1d5812e1e7
https://web.archive.org/web/20200627085307/https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet-5e1d5812e1e7

So these people were incorrect. I will also note that the Wayback Machine DOES have some kind of blacklist, but it is much more straightforward. The result will say "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine." See: https://web.archive.org/web/*/boards.4chan.org/b and I believe 99% of the time it's robots.txt exclusion (https://boards.4channel.org/robots.txt) but that other pages which are manually requested to be removed from the archive might also show the same message. I can't prove this but I drew this conclusion myself from previous observation.

[–]sproketboy[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Ultimately the archive did not make an archive of the page. It still went back to the source to get a 404 - so it's garbage.

[–]hajamieli 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They did, but the archived page is loading some JS from medium that turns it into a 404 page. Turn of JS to load the archived pages and view them.