[cormorant]

I attempted to google to guess what you meant.

I found: (1) they recently removed KiwiFarms; (2) in 2020, they began labeling certain pages with "fact checks"; (3) they remove content by request of the site owner or by copyright complaint.

Of those, (2) seems the most political, but it's not removing content. Was there something else you had in mind?

[Gigachad]

Removing kiwi farms was a bad decision. The copyright and site owner did not request it and the content was not illegal. So the IA is picking content to delist based on their own feelings rather than simply archiving.

[JKCalhoun]

Had to look up what Kiwi Farm even is/was.

> Supporters of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign celebrated the Internet Archive’s decision. “Internet heroes right here,” tweeted Yonah Gerber, who urged the Archive to remove the site. Kiwi Farms is known for collecting and publicizing personal details about targets it holds in contempt, many of whom are transgender women like Sorrenti. While the site ostensibly discourages direct harassment, Sorrenti has faced swatting attacks and persistent threats during her campaign, and other targets have had similarly ugly experiences. Kiwi Farms has been allegedly linked with three suicides, including an emulator developer who blamed the site for a relentless harassment operation soon before their death. [1]

Yeah, I have to say that I recognize nuance and am okay with archive.org nixing content like the above.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23341051/kiwi-farms-intern...

[Gigachad]

The problem with IA dropping the site was that no one could actually verify the claims about it while the site had been taken offline by the same campaign. It’s not a wonderful site but most of the claims the media make are easily proven false. For some reason much of the media confuses kiwi farms with 8chan and makes completely incorrect statements on it.

The emulator dev was never the subject of any kiwifarms discussion. Their letter blamed the state of mental health in America, Donald Trump, and kiwi farms. If that’s the bar for a site being pulled offline, then all social media should be.

[auveair]

> the content was not illegal

The content was clearly libelous and defamatory, which is pretty illegal. In some countries it would also count as harassement.

[huffals]

The content was embarrassing and revealing for the people it concerned (hence efforts to remove it through any means necessary), but not libelous or defamatory - it consisted of archived material of their own words.

[ryeights]

Libelous/defamatory content is not illegal in the same vein as pirated movies or CSAM, in that the Internet Archive would be criminally liable for hosting it. I wouldn’t imagine it’s illegal for IA to host a snapshot of a defamatory news article, for example.

[bityard]

> The content was clearly libelous and defamatory, which is pretty illegal.

That is incorrect. In the US, the _act_ of libel is illegal and the author of it can get into legal trouble. And a publisher might if they knowingly published false information, which is harder to prove. But the libelous _content_ itself is not illegal and is in fact protected by the First Amendment.

[HereIGoAgain]

Indeed. It goes against everything the site claims to be about.

[readsadhours]

They also remove legal pornographic content https://archive.org/post/1053748/porn-on-ia-wtf https://archive.org/post/1123868/no-bdsm-allowed

I think that puritanism and archivism are not compatible.

They also removed ISIS stuff https://archive.org/post/1033012/constant-removal-of-isis-vi...

Removing evidence of war-crimes and disallowing future historians from accessing such content in the future is not a policy that I would expect from an archive.

[Dalewyn]

(1) is egregious if the goal is an archive of the internet.

An archive should have everything of what is being archived, legalese notwithstanding: The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, everything. E v e r y t h i n g . If it doesn't have everything, it's not an archive.

[detaro]

of course "not visible in the wayback machine" doesn't mean "they don't have it".