U.K. Parties Prepare for 2015 by Erasing Web Histories
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I'm not sure how this kind of thing used to be handled prior to the web being a major campaign tool. I wonder how easy it was to get hold of the 1992 Labour election manifesto in 1997, when such things existed only as printed documents.
There has always been a thriving cottage industry of political obsessives (in a good way!) who maintain their own archives of this kind of material. It turns out that you can't get old election manifestos from the Labour party, but you can get them here: http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/ - and the Conservative one here: http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1992/
I'm not sure what's best here. Should we put greater pressure on political parties (and other similar organisations) to maintain a public history of their own activity despite this being sometimes against their self-interest, or should we support the efforts of third parties who archive this stuff without such conflicts of interest? (Of course, the right answer might be "both").
This then has the effect of removing it from the Internet Archive for a start...
https://archive.org/about/exclude.php
"The Internet Archive is not interested in offering access to web sites or other Internet documents whose authors do not want their materials in the collection."
I find it slightly odd that the internet archive then drop historical pages, but the jump some are making to this being Orwellian I find a leap too far.
And taking this to its natural conclusion, a malicious opponent could fake archive data in order to gain an advantage.
I suspect that Americans, and those under 30, aren't going to understand this reference. As to those both American and under 30, well, they're double double plus unable to understand this reference.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984
Didn't know that, thank you, many years since I was in school. So has 1984 replaced Catcher in the Rye? That would be a shame, as well as a difficult choice.
I would have loved to see a political party, or a newspaper request libraries to delete their copies.
So, what is a digital archive other, then a library, our repository of shared human historic-source-files? Why do we make it that easy for anyone, to destroy things, that might be of interest to future historians/generations?
I strongly believe, that our day and age will be one of the least known to future generations, as so much of the digital artifacts will be lost without the smallest possibility, to recover any artifact of it.
And yes, it is copyrighted material, but was copyright ever conceived as a tool for history-mingling or censorship?
As with the original poster, I'm uncertain as to why IA has decided this means 'purge all copies'.
The standard behavior of search engines in such cases should be to remove the entire website from the index. All or nothing.
I suspect what they mean is that requests for the files send an appropriate HTTP status code (e.g. 410 - Gone). This is standard practice on any website where something is no longer available and is used by search engines to spot dead links.
It's not a request to Google for censorship.
http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2013/11/co...
This does not just cause search engines to stop linking to it, but also causes all the main engines to remove it from publicly accessible caches, and causes Internet Archive to remove the pages as well.
As a quick fix, the wonderful British Library has a service called www.webarchive.org.uk. Here are some speeches from 2008 : http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20081209103831/...
They also seem to have done something with their YT channel. For example, this video is dated Mar 21, 2007, but when viewing the channel and sorting by oldest first, it's not there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbPpcuh7DF8
At Prime Ministers Questions.
Opposition: Another bank scandal, not doing enough, blah blah blah
PM: ignores question Well the hypocrasy, in 2009 opposition was shaking hands with these people. In 2005 you praised the banks blah blah nonsense blah.
In UK politics any position you take today is used as a weapon against you tomorrow. This is my understanding of why things are being deleted.
Take the conservatives. Before the banking crisis they wanted to match Labour spending. On crime they wanted to hug a hoodie.. now they believe in Austerity, blame Labour party for the financial problems and are tough on crime. Turns out that the world changes and so do policies and I guess this drastic step is to reduce the ammount of ammunition each other have.
I am not sure it matters that they are deleted. Surely the websites of political parties should reflect the policies of today. It is up to historians, archivists and the media to note and store the speeches of yesterday.
As it damn well should be. If I'm voting for a person or party on the basis of some promise they are making about a given policy or a claim that they have an understanding/capability of something, I want to be able to see their history of keeping (or not) said promised and proving (or now) their actual understanding/capability.
Someone who has a history of being badly wrong and/or not keeping their word is someone I'm less likely to trust. That'll be the majority of current politicians (ours and those in other countries). I don't consider this position to be at all unreasonable. Someone who actively hides that they were wrong in the past, and/or made promises that have since not been kept, is someone I trust even less.
Removing the content from their site to replace it with up-to-date positions I'm OK with, we understand it is a fluffy promotion site rather than a library of meaningful and historically accurate information anyway, but actively working to have the old content removed from other archives is simply not on IMO.
http://www.labour.org.uk/gordon_brown_conference
Saying "The opposition Labour Party has eliminated all news items from before Ed Miliband was elected its leader in September 2010 from its website." seems a little strong.
The Digital Economy Act was the only thing that has ever made me actually write to my (then) MP (Justine Greening) - the response displayed nothing but a complete lack of both care and understanding. Ridiculous.
There is no excuse. Stick to the manifesto or we should be able to fire them instantly and force another election.
Indeed, even if someone can win a majority, it's very bad liberalism to say they should be allowed to implement anything - politics is as much about fighting the tyranny of the majority as implementing what you want to.
Of course, when we're talking about the NHS changes, which were in no manifesto, but seemed to have been a tory plan for many years, we have a right to be angry. Indeed, the Lib Dem constitution has almost certainly been blatantly violated in respect of this and other policies - Our MPs aren't whippable on anything that isn't party policy, with the exception of the Coalition Agreement (which was passed by a vote at a special conference session, which I attended.)
Of course, they seem to accept the government whip on such matters, which makes activists like me very depressed for the state of our MPs (who are mostly the richest activists from their local area - since we're a very poor party who ask our candidates to fund their own campaigns - this is the reason I'm in favour of some sensible way of state funding parties, although I don't know I've ever heard a good implementation.)
[1] SNP. populist party without any real philosophy, thus able to seem to appeal to everyone simultaneously.