Wayback Machine will now fact-check archived webpages
Fact-checking has become one of the most popular ways to fight disinformation online. You can see it in action on sites like Facebook and Twitter, where certain posts now come attached with annotations for context.
Some believe these moves are a form of censorship by social media companies. Like health professionals, others say it’s the best way to stop disinformation from going viral and harming people. Tap or click here to see how Facebook blocked the spread of a viral COVID-19 conspiracy theory.
Social media sites aren’t the only ones doing fact-checking these days, either. The Internet Archive has announced that it’s adding fact-checks to its catalog of old and deleted web pages. Will this be enough to stop debunked conspiracy theories from coming back to life?
A silver bullet for zombie disinformation?
Internet Archive is the web’s biggest library of digital material. Its most famous feature, the Wayback Machine, lets you search for nearly any webpage to see how it looked in the past. You can even use the Wayback Machine to see websites and content that no longer exist online.
This brings up a scary question: When websites delete misinformation and conspiracy theories, where do they go? As it turns out, you can still find plenty of them with the Wayback Machine.
That’s why the Internet Archive announced it would start fact-checking archived pages to prevent them from being misused or misunderstood.
In a new blog post, the Archive outlined how it would be adding banners to the top of webpages with fact-checks and context. This will provide more accurate information to researchers without censoring the pages themselves.
One example the blog post shows is a deleted Medium post about COVID-19. The post was originally removed for violating Medium’s rules, but old versions of the archive would not have included that context. With this update, anyone reading the page will know it broke the rules.
Another example involves a disinformation campaign that was caught in the act. Researchers at Graphika discovered this site was part of a Russian government effort, and their report is now included in the yellow banner at the top of the archive.
The great 5G coronavirus conspiracy
“A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”
– Mark Twain (and others)