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Comment by throwaway48476 | Hacker News Reader

When the internet archive censors a website is it deleted permanently or just not publicly available?

They black out all items that get a DMCA complaint or similar request (so it's still there just not accessible). However they permanently delete illegal stuff.

I would assume they delete illegal stuff as they are compelled to. What I'd like to know is their policy for legal stuff that they exclude that is not as a result of DMCA.

Can you give an example?

EDIT: Just seen your other reply. Perhaps it was excluded due to right to forget laws?

If you ask them they will remove sites that you created. It's not under right to forget laws as they don't exist in the US. What I'd like to know is whether they also delete the data or just make it inaccessible.

ploetzblog was available and is now completly gone :( "lost" some recipes that he didn't migrate that I used to bake all the time. Used to look it up on the IA and was pissed when it was deleted

Honestly we are so lucky to have something like this. Solving this problem in a decentralized manner is so hard, and when a centralized solution has its drawbacks, when done properly (i.e. not for making money but serving greater values) is invaluable. A gift.

I don't think they censor anything, strictly archiving. Do you know of any instance in which they censored a site?

I take it you’ve never encountered the dreaded message, “The item is not available due to issues with the item's content”?

There was a news item here on HN about something available on the Internet Archive: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725526> This is now gone from IA. Old page with links to IA which are no longer working: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180331224513/http://profileeng...>

http://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/twitter.com/taylo...

For one. I'm just curious what their policy is.

The law trumps their policy, to be blunt. They can't afford legal disputes so complying is the best thing they can do. They're still involved in legal shit for "giving away" ebooks too easily during the pandemic.

I only know what I just read on wikipedia about her, but it seems like she has been heavily doxxed — I'm guessing she requested this information about herself be excluded? If so, I'm not sure I'd classify that as censorship.

It's her own tweets, not dox.

Not dox but I was thinking there could be old materials in there that people were using to dox her. Idk, why else would they remove it?

https://archive.fo/p8DmQ

Kiwi farms

There are people that maintain "non-public archives" of stuff like that for litigation, long-term archival storage (think sealed boxes intended for future generations of historians. (Libraries, laywers, journalists can run their own WebRecorder, Perma.cc, ArchiveBox, etc. instances)

I think that's a reasonable middle ground, we don't necessarily need every single piece of heinous content mirrored for free access 24/7 the moment it appears anywhere on the internet, as long as there is some historic record somewhere that's probably ok.

Nah, we don't need to archive their targeted harassment.

good

An argument can be made that they should retain a copy for future lawsuits / investigations, but... kiwi farms won't have anything public, and I hope that law enforcement has their private archive where they gather everything.

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