The number of cases of censorship is growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing lawsuits and increased public attention, mainstream social media has been more violent in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for certain what will be immediately removed and debate among themselves about content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have abandoned YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing a large audience just to see their content survive and see the light of day.
It’s not always about censorship or not. Current algorithms include a range of tools that influence searchability and discoverability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump was viewed a whopping 34 million times before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it difficult to find, even presiding over a technical glitch that made viewing impossible for many people. Faced with this, Rogan took to platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the alternative media business model.
Those are just the main points. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that fundamentally impact any historian’s ability to even look back and recount what is happening. Incredibly, the Archive.org service, which has been around since 1994, has stopped making images of content across all platforms. For the first time in thirty years, it has been a long time – since October 8 to 10 – that this service has captured the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify the content posted during the three weeks of October leading up to the days of the most controversial and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are archived in ways that are available to users. In fact, the entire memory of our most important information system is just a big black hole at the moment.
Archive.org’s troubles started on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that not only brought down the service, but also introduced a level of failure that almost completely shut it down. Archive.org worked around the clock and returned as a read-only service to where it is today. However, you can only read content posted before the attack. The service has not yet resumed public mirroring of sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only resource on the entire World Wide Web that displays content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been deprived of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple for researchers investigating government and corporate actions.
For example, this service allowed Brownstone researchers to discover exactly what the CDC had said about plexiglass, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rent moratoriums. That content was later all removed from the live internet, so access to archival copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. The same was true of the World Health Organization and its disregard for natural immunity, which was later changed. We were able to document the changing definitions thanks to this tool, which is now disabled.
What this means is this: any website can post something today and delete it tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless a user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then, there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach of knowing who said what and when is now gone. That is, the entire Internet is already being censored in real time, so that during these crucial weeks when large swaths of the public expect full-blown foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything without getting caught.
We know what you’re thinking. This DDOS attack was certainly no coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that’s true. We just don’t know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? This is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and the exposure of customer email addresses and encrypted passwords, the JavaScript of the Internet Archive’s website was defaced, prompting us to take the site offline to gain access and our improve security. The Internet Archive’s stored data is secure and we are working to resume service safely. This new reality requires more attention to cybersecurity and we are responding. We apologize for the consequences if these library services are unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things there is no way to know, but the attempt to blow away the Internet’s ability to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized over global level. The Declaration on the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, with governments and relevant authorities working together with academics, civil society, the private sector, the technical community and others.” All these stakeholders benefit from the ability to trade online without leaving a trace.
Just to be sure, an Archive.org librarian wrote: “While the Wayback Machine was in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving continued. These materials will be available through the Wayback Machine once the services are secured.”
When? We don’t know. Before the elections? In five years? There could be some technical reasons, but it seems that if the web crawling continues behind the scenes as the comment suggests, it could now also be available in read-only mode. That’s not it.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were looking for, just below the live version. They now have enough server space to make that possible, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, Google’s caching service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, in late September 2024.
For example, the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5 election.
Other troubling trends are also turning internet search results into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved stories. The web standard used to be that search rankings were determined by user behavior, links, citations, and so on. These were more or less organic statistics, based on a collection of data that indicated how useful a search result was to Internet users. Very simply put: the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. One day in 1999 it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was wealthy. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool everyone was using as a kind of benchmark for status on the Internet. It used to be common to learn about an article somewhere on the internet and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, people would notice, but if it wasn’t, no one would care.
This is how an entire generation of web engineers functioned. The system worked as well as you would expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did something strange. It released its home assistant (and monitoring device) of the same name. Suddenly everyone had them at home and could discover everything by saying ‘Hey Alexa’. There seemed something strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated company it had acquired years earlier. There was undoubtedly some confusion caused by the overlapping of names.
This is what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively removed the web rankings tool. It didn’t sell it. It has not raised prices. It didn’t matter. As a result, it suddenly became completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blown away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All these data points that may not seem connected on their own are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
It makes you wonder if anyone remembers what it used to be like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underlines the point: there will be no more memory.
At the time of writing, the entire three weeks of web content has not yet been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is a mystery. And we have no idea when the service will return. It’s entirely possible that it won’t come back, that the only real history we can appeal to will happen before October 8, 2024, the date everything changed.
The Internet was created to be free and democratic. It will take tremendous effort at this point to restore that vision because something else will quickly replace it.
