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The consolidation and permanence of the web are definitely concerning. Moving from "somebody knows this happened" or "this is in a file drawer somewhere" to "there's a searchable record of this" expand everyone's access to the info, and can do a lot to stave off forgetfulness and bit rot. But the people whose gain the most access are the ones who weren't involved in the first place, and the intersection of "uninvolved" and "cares enough to check" tends to be people who are actively hostile. Hence doxxing, stolen photos, and callouts over years-old tweets. But that's a broad result of digitization. If a reporter or opposition researcher wants to embarrass someone, they can already look through digitized student newspaper essays, find interview subjects off class rolls, or simply comb through Twitter for long-forgotten offenses. (This holds for both good and ill - it applies to both serious skeletons and misleading or trivial issues.) The Internet Archive, then, seems like sousveillance offsetting surveillance. For those who can point time, money, and connections at a target, it's enough that evidence exists, and more than enough that it's available online. But for the general public, it's much harder to keep track of countless sources or publicize news. If you can't dedicate interns and an archive to tracking every news story you read, you can't find or prove edits. (And while most newspapers noted corrections or morning/evening revisions, silently changing online stories has become common practice even for the likes of the BBC.) If you can't point out a webpage or tweet to thousands of people at once, the evidence is likely to be taken down before it's recognized. There are a lot of dedicated sites like NewsDiffs working on this problem, but Internet Archive provides a general-purpose answer to "let an average person see the history of a page or create a trusted record of it". I worry that this just amounts to an eye for an eye, and still increases the total amount of scrutiny we're all under. But as long as more content is becoming permanent, it still seems better to have symmetrical access to it. |