6 ms·

Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages

54 points by bjeds 6y ago

dgrin91 6y ago
This stuff makes me REALLY nervous. Its one thing to have a discussion about the here and now and debate what is true or not. There are plenty of very good fact checkers to help with this. Wayback though is now going back and promoting a chosen context. History should be preserved for its integrity. If someone said something false let it stand on its own feet. Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true. They say that victors write history, but that shouldn't be the goal.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- taxicab 6y ago
  > Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true That is literally what they are doing. They are literally linking to context and other articles. People can make up their own minds about Wayback Machine's content. They added even more information to help make up your mind on content that expresses a contentious opinion. That super helpful since I want to see as many sides as possible! Why would you want to censor that context unless you want to manipulate people into believe blatantly false misinformation?
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Because the “context” is never fairly applied. I want a little bubble that lights up every time a Democrat says we’re cutting school funding and teachers are under paid. It would just be a chart showing that school funding has tripled since I was a kid and showing American teachers are paid higher than the OECD average. This is a bread-and-butter Democrat assertion that’s made literally everywhere, but fact checkers never add that “context.”
    - taxicab 6y ago
      I looked up your statistics and the reason there is nobody calling it out is because, first, that's not the claim being made (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it) and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. In fact, the gap in lifetime earnings compared with other countries gets even bigger when you account for their lower starting salaries as well as lower total compensation (including benefits). Ironically, this is a great example of the system working and not propagating partisan "alternative facts" like what you want. It's all projection. You just can't imagine people adding reasonable context to contentious information because you know that if you were in that position that you would abuse it like with your misleading teacher claim. Nobody is out to get you and no you are not a victim of some sort of liberal conspiracy. It won't hurt you if you get an occasional dose of reality injected back into your brain if you decide to browse the Wayback Machine during the next Fox News commercial break.
      - xyzzyz 6y ago
        > (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it) I've never seen this argument, and frankly, I don't really understand it -- what are "equivalently trained professions", and why all "equivalently trained professions" should be paid the same? > and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. That's interesting, can you show me some data behind it? I haven't heard this one either.
        ShamelessC 6y ago
        > I've never seen this argument. It's incredibly common. Even here on HN. I personally empathize with it because I'm a programmer and I'm quite certain much of the work I do provides less value than a decent teacher would _in the long term_. Societies benefit from paying teachers more as: - they deserve more - higher salaries attract better teachers and actual domain experts who have little economic incentive to teach when they can make more elsewhere. - a better educated workforce will pay for itself in the long run, although I think FUD over deficit spending isn't necessary here and would be fine if it eventually creates increased output/asset creation. I am not claiming that these ideas are proven, just that I personally empathize with them. If you or anyone has research to counter or back up these claims that would be very helpful.
- zorpner 6y ago
  The lesson of the past ten years should be that most people are incapable of looking at the content and context and deciding on their own if it is true, and additionally are being subjected to a constant barrage of paid-for (whether by advertisers, corporate interests, or state actors) psychologically manipulative content. I'm unsure about this and I don't know the answer -- but it's definitely not Present All Things As If They Were Equally Valid.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    Ah yes we should make sure we tell people The Truth, with warnings on Not Truth, such that they don't make Wrong Decisions. The next step will be to "sanitize" Wrong Think from the archive, lest some poor easily convinced soul be led to it.
    - csnover 6y ago
      Your first sentence could be a literal description of the concept of education: telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing group-think.
      - pessimizer 6y ago
        > telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. That's also what Scientologists claim to be doing.
        csnover 6y ago
        Why do you feel like the appropriate way to respond to a comment pointing out a bad faith argument is to reply with another bad faith argument?
        6y ago
- csnover 6y ago
  Adding context and giving suggestions for additional material is something librarians and museum curators have done probably since the dawn of the profession, and it’s all I can see happening here. I’m really struggling with your take that this is somehow a new or bad development. Have you ever been to a library and asked for help finding something and received a suggestion that if you are looking to read X, you might also want to read Y? Have you ever been to a museum and seen a placard next to an object describing its historical significance? How is this somehow different? Because it’s “on the internet”? IA is not compelling anyone to click on the link to PolitiFact, or the link to the report on foreign interference, or the link to the Medium content policy. They aren’t deleting or rewriting the content of the page. They’re attaching a link. Do you think that a book or a documentary destroys the “integrity” of the original material by adding a non-destructive narration or voice over that offers extra context? How could someone can even do what you want, to “look at the content and context”, if IA doesn’t provide any context?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I've been to libraries that offer context, recommendations, etc, but that doesn't seem like a very close analogy here. I've never seen a library book with a warning on the cover saying the librarians think it contains false claims, and if a library did apply such labels I'd be worried about how willing they are to continue stocking those books.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      I also own a lot of books that contain a lot of falsehoods. I wonder if there will be an inspector.
    - csnover 6y ago
      How close does the analogy need to be in order for you to feel comfortable that what Internet Archive are doing is not at all dangerous or unprecedented? While you may not have encountered it, some libraries do label books for content[0]: > Some libraries block access to certain materials by placing physical or virtual barriers between the user and those materials. For example, materials are sometimes labeled for content or placed in a “locked case,” “adults only,” “restricted shelf,” or “high-demand” collection. (emphasis mine) Here’s another real-world example. In the physical world, book publishers often print updated editions of books with corrections, distribute errata, attach disclaimers[1], and sometimes recall books entirely[2]. (If you feel the urge to split hairs here about how one entity is a third-party publisher and the other is a third-party library, please think seriously on how this distinction is relevant to adding context.) The concerns that the ALA have with labelling in the physical world don’t apply to what IA is doing, since IA are not creating barriers for patrons to access content, they are just adding context—as book publishers, museum curators, librarians, film distributors, documentarians, historians, and others have done for centuries. [0] http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/restrictedaccess http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpret... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/business/media/publisher-to-put-asterisk-on-primates-of-park-avenue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/business/media/publisher-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/naomi-wolf-outrages-errors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/naomi-wolf-outrages...
Von_Lipwig 6y ago
Who asked for this?
- glerk 6y ago
  Politically motivated organizations.
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  China.
- Duwensatzaj 6y ago
  Those who in their hearts dream themselves our masters - https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE
guidovranken 6y ago
I think I've seen this movie before. You better start grabbing from the archive what you don't want to be lost forever.
- drummer 6y ago
  You are right. It looks like we won't be enjoying freedoms (of speech) on archive.org for much longer.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  archivebox is a self hosted wayback machine that is easy to setup and very robust. https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
thysultan 6y ago
It's all down hill from here!
ffpip 6y ago
We all know how this is going to end up. It always starts with fact checking and then moves on to removing articles that are wrong.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  In between now and that end point, it is neither one beast nor another. It is a partially flag corpus in which some articles are meta labelled for fact checking and some aren't. Who gets to choose which articles are scrutinised and which aren't?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
It seems that the leadership of archive.org is completely broken. First was the stupid stunt of saying they were a library and lending out unlimited digital copies, when it was pretty obvious that doing that would lead to huge copyright issues. Now it is this, moving them from being just an archiver of information to a commenter on information as well as an archiver and jumping headfirst into the culture wars. I don’t want archive.org to be an exciting organization. I want it to be a boring organization that just archives as much of the internet as they can plausibly can. It seems that current leadership is not content with being that.
- drummer 6y ago
  The leadership could have been compromised in some way.

54 points by bjeds 6y ago

This stuff makes me REALLY nervous. Its one thing to have a discussion about the here and now and debate what is true or not. There are plenty of very good fact checkers to help with this. Wayback though is now going back and promoting a chosen context. History should be preserved for its integrity. If someone said something false let it stand on its own feet. Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true. They say that victors write history, but that shouldn't be the goal.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
taxicab 6y ago
> Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true That is literally what they are doing. They are literally linking to context and other articles. People can make up their own minds about Wayback Machine's content. They added even more information to help make up your mind on content that expresses a contentious opinion. That super helpful since I want to see as many sides as possible! Why would you want to censor that context unless you want to manipulate people into believe blatantly false misinformation?
- rayiner 6y ago
  Because the “context” is never fairly applied. I want a little bubble that lights up every time a Democrat says we’re cutting school funding and teachers are under paid. It would just be a chart showing that school funding has tripled since I was a kid and showing American teachers are paid higher than the OECD average. This is a bread-and-butter Democrat assertion that’s made literally everywhere, but fact checkers never add that “context.”
  - taxicab 6y ago
    I looked up your statistics and the reason there is nobody calling it out is because, first, that's not the claim being made (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it) and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. In fact, the gap in lifetime earnings compared with other countries gets even bigger when you account for their lower starting salaries as well as lower total compensation (including benefits). Ironically, this is a great example of the system working and not propagating partisan "alternative facts" like what you want. It's all projection. You just can't imagine people adding reasonable context to contentious information because you know that if you were in that position that you would abuse it like with your misleading teacher claim. Nobody is out to get you and no you are not a victim of some sort of liberal conspiracy. It won't hurt you if you get an occasional dose of reality injected back into your brain if you decide to browse the Wayback Machine during the next Fox News commercial break.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      > (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it) I've never seen this argument, and frankly, I don't really understand it -- what are "equivalently trained professions", and why all "equivalently trained professions" should be paid the same? > and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. That's interesting, can you show me some data behind it? I haven't heard this one either.
      - ShamelessC 6y ago
        > I've never seen this argument. It's incredibly common. Even here on HN. I personally empathize with it because I'm a programmer and I'm quite certain much of the work I do provides less value than a decent teacher would _in the long term_. Societies benefit from paying teachers more as: - they deserve more - higher salaries attract better teachers and actual domain experts who have little economic incentive to teach when they can make more elsewhere. - a better educated workforce will pay for itself in the long run, although I think FUD over deficit spending isn't necessary here and would be fine if it eventually creates increased output/asset creation. I am not claiming that these ideas are proven, just that I personally empathize with them. If you or anyone has research to counter or back up these claims that would be very helpful.
zorpner 6y ago
The lesson of the past ten years should be that most people are incapable of looking at the content and context and deciding on their own if it is true, and additionally are being subjected to a constant barrage of paid-for (whether by advertisers, corporate interests, or state actors) psychologically manipulative content. I'm unsure about this and I don't know the answer -- but it's definitely not Present All Things As If They Were Equally Valid.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Ah yes we should make sure we tell people The Truth, with warnings on Not Truth, such that they don't make Wrong Decisions. The next step will be to "sanitize" Wrong Think from the archive, lest some poor easily convinced soul be led to it.
  - csnover 6y ago
    Your first sentence could be a literal description of the concept of education: telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing group-think.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      > telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions. That's also what Scientologists claim to be doing.
      - csnover 6y ago
        Why do you feel like the appropriate way to respond to a comment pointing out a bad faith argument is to reply with another bad faith argument?
        6y ago
csnover 6y ago
Adding context and giving suggestions for additional material is something librarians and museum curators have done probably since the dawn of the profession, and it’s all I can see happening here. I’m really struggling with your take that this is somehow a new or bad development. Have you ever been to a library and asked for help finding something and received a suggestion that if you are looking to read X, you might also want to read Y? Have you ever been to a museum and seen a placard next to an object describing its historical significance? How is this somehow different? Because it’s “on the internet”? IA is not compelling anyone to click on the link to PolitiFact, or the link to the report on foreign interference, or the link to the Medium content policy. They aren’t deleting or rewriting the content of the page. They’re attaching a link. Do you think that a book or a documentary destroys the “integrity” of the original material by adding a non-destructive narration or voice over that offers extra context? How could someone can even do what you want, to “look at the content and context”, if IA doesn’t provide any context?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I've been to libraries that offer context, recommendations, etc, but that doesn't seem like a very close analogy here. I've never seen a library book with a warning on the cover saying the librarians think it contains false claims, and if a library did apply such labels I'd be worried about how willing they are to continue stocking those books.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    I also own a lot of books that contain a lot of falsehoods. I wonder if there will be an inspector.
  - csnover 6y ago
    How close does the analogy need to be in order for you to feel comfortable that what Internet Archive are doing is not at all dangerous or unprecedented? While you may not have encountered it, some libraries do label books for content[0]: > Some libraries block access to certain materials by placing physical or virtual barriers between the user and those materials. For example, materials are sometimes labeled for content or placed in a “locked case,” “adults only,” “restricted shelf,” or “high-demand” collection. (emphasis mine) Here’s another real-world example. In the physical world, book publishers often print updated editions of books with corrections, distribute errata, attach disclaimers[1], and sometimes recall books entirely[2]. (If you feel the urge to split hairs here about how one entity is a third-party publisher and the other is a third-party library, please think seriously on how this distinction is relevant to adding context.) The concerns that the ALA have with labelling in the physical world don’t apply to what IA is doing, since IA are not creating barriers for patrons to access content, they are just adding context—as book publishers, museum curators, librarians, film distributors, documentarians, historians, and others have done for centuries. [0] http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/restrictedaccess http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpret... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/business/media/publisher-to-put-asterisk-on-primates-of-park-avenue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/business/media/publisher-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/naomi-wolf-outrages-errors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/naomi-wolf-outrages...

Von_Lipwig 6y ago

Who asked for this?

glerk 6y ago
Politically motivated organizations.
octoberfranklin 6y ago
China.
Duwensatzaj 6y ago
Those who in their hearts dream themselves our masters - https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE

guidovranken 6y ago

I think I've seen this movie before. You better start grabbing from the archive what you don't want to be lost forever.

drummer 6y ago
You are right. It looks like we won't be enjoying freedoms (of speech) on archive.org for much longer.
vorpalhex 6y ago
archivebox is a self hosted wayback machine that is easy to setup and very robust. https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/

thysultan 6y ago

It's all down hill from here!

ffpip 6y ago

We all know how this is going to end up. It always starts with fact checking and then moves on to removing articles that are wrong.

wombatmobile 6y ago
In between now and that end point, it is neither one beast nor another. It is a partially flag corpus in which some articles are meta labelled for fact checking and some aren't. Who gets to choose which articles are scrutinised and which aren't?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

It seems that the leadership of archive.org is completely broken. First was the stupid stunt of saying they were a library and lending out unlimited digital copies, when it was pretty obvious that doing that would lead to huge copyright issues. Now it is this, moving them from being just an archiver of information to a commenter on information as well as an archiver and jumping headfirst into the culture wars. I don’t want archive.org to be an exciting organization. I want it to be a boring organization that just archives as much of the internet as they can plausibly can. It seems that current leadership is not content with being that.

drummer 6y ago
The leadership could have been compromised in some way.