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Comment by RubyPinch | Hacker News Reader

Its quite interesting

Anti-Hillary has gone about leaking private correspondence and documents to "attack" her

Anti-Trump (which I'm considering Archive to be, considering their prior reactions), has gone about collecting and documenting public data to "attack" him.

As a nice side-effect, it does mean that (for the most part) truth is being used as the weapon of choice, which I think is pretty great. I hope the act of publishing truth as a political tactic becomes more of a thing over time, even if partisan.

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I'd not be surprised if many individuals at the IA dislike Trump, but why do you say the IA is biased against him?

This effort is a direct continuation of their Political TV archives which have over the last years become more and more important and popular. They catalog every political ad around elections, every speech given by every candidate, etc. As far as I can see, all they're saying here is that they've put the Trump videos into their own category, which seems reasonable given that he's an important figure and a lot of people are looking for this data.

I suspect they would have created a similar thing for Hillary if she'd won. Don't know if they did one for Obama, but as I said this part of the archive has been growing fast for the past years and gotten them a lot of visibility from mainstream news media that uses this data, so it's not surprising that they're using the election result to draw attention to their archive.

The timing and technological era is important here. I don't think the Archive was doing its Political TV project until this past year [0], so the question of why they didn't do it for Obama doesn't apply. And since Clinton didn't win, we don't know what they would have done for her. 2008 is a long time to think back on but I don't think that the Archive had the tech/scale/people to implement the political ad tracker back in 2008 -- it's a massive amount of video, for one thing https://politicaladarchive.org/

[0] https://blog.archive.org/2016/01/22/political-tv-ad-archive-...

For their bias, I'd look to their November announcement of creating the Internet Archive Of Canada:

https://blog.archive.org/2016/11/29/help-us-keep-the-archive...

"On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change. It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change."

Interesting. I'll agree that this points to the organization having a preference in the outcome here.

However, the original post that started this thread seemed to indicate that their data was suspect due to their bias. I remain very skeptical of this, given that their goal is to collect all the political ads and speeches, regardless of party or candidate. Time will tell I guess, but until we have indications otherwise I will continue to consider the Internet Archive's library a reliable source of unbiased information.

Lessig actively campaigning for electoral revolt left a bad taste in my mouth. I respect what he/they have done for the common good in the past, but lately he/they seem more biased vs. Trump than fighting for civil liberties and the common good.

Lessig has nothing to do with the Internet Archive, as far as I'm aware.

Wow, thanks. I made an erroneous connection between the two over a decade ago and have assumed ever since that Lessig was somehow involved with the Archive(board member, legal team, early Kahle collaborator). TIL.

The important part is that they are going to annotate those first-party sources with 'fact checking', which is slanted left [0][1] in the US and has infinite regression problems. Also, they are doing this all with humans, and the overt perception of bias means that it will attract biased people over time.

It may eventually become an attack site that cherry-picks the past to provide ammunition, because that is a lower energy state, being easier to do than actual human annotation.

[0] http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/16/running-data-politifact-...

[1] https://thefederalist.com/2016/12/29/politifact-slants-truth...

'Truth' should go in scare quotes here. If they're going to dedicate an entire program to attacking someone, and they hold the reins in what goes in the archives and what does not, why would you expect the end result to be the full, unadulterated truth? Rather than out-of-context soundbites and a highlight reel of whatever makes Trump look bad?

I completely agree with that.

However, I do think the current situation is valuable regardless. As long as we have some people on each side, doing whatever they can to attack their enemies with truth.

It might not inform us of how great each candidate is, but will give us a pretty good idea of how bad each candidate is.

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Non-partisan truth finders are obviously better, but only if they are actually non-partisan! People who control the truth without making it obvious they do, I'd find more concerning!

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