In America’s new era of censorship, digital archivists are democracy’s backup drive
Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is the systematic erasure of public knowledge and the archivists fighting our slide into digital darkness.
The thing is:
Banning books would never be enough. The anti-intellectual spirit is strong among the brutish bullies. Consequently, America is in a new era of censorship, a “constitutional crisis” and, yes, what a growing group of historians label “fascism.” It’s led to some weird outcomes. When Trump officials recently scrubbed the word “diverse” from federal websites, for instance, they even deleted it from descriptions of the Department of the Interior’s diverse museum collections. Until now, a bunch of different kinds of, say, rocks in federal possession could've been most simply described as “diverse” if it weren’t for this bizarrely zealous censorship.
The scope is staggering: more than 8,000 pages of federal websites changed within days, with critical health information removed, marginalized folks erased from the federal record and climate science research disappeared with a keystroke.
The thing about that is:
It’s an attempt to rewrite reality by hitting delete on facts. It might even work if it weren’t for our unsung heroes, digital archivists.
As Chris Freeland, director of library services at the Internet Archive, tells ESC KEY .CO: “Recent events have made it painfully clear how fragile our digital history is. From government data disappearing overnight to entire sites vanishing, we're seeing critical records scrubbed from the live web in real time.”
Case in point: When journalists at The Washington Post set out to investigate the scrubbing of federal websites, they turned to an essential but often underappreciated tool used by journalists, researchers and democracy defenders the world over: the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
The Post’s methodology reveals how this digital preservation project has become the backbone of accountability journalism. By comparing current versions of federal webpages to their archived snapshots, reporters Jeremy B. Merrill, Azi Paybarah and Eric Lau exposed a coordinated attack. The investigation uncovered more than 600 strategic alterations across federal agencies, each preserved in the Wayback Machine's digital amber. This is a systematic purge touching everything from key climate data to CDC health guidance.
When the CDC began removing datasets about disease transmission and vaccine effectiveness, public health researchers used Internet Archive tools. They launched into what virologist Angela Rasmussen called “deletion disobedience,” in an interview with Ars Technica’s Ashley Belanger. Rasmussen said it's “one way to fight back.”
Where things get interesting:
Long before this wave of deletions began, a coalition of libraries and research organizations were preparing for this moment. The End of Term Web Archive project — a collaboration between the Internet Archive, Library of Congress, Stanford University Libraries and other institutions — has spent nearly two decades preserving federal websites during presidential transitions, treating each handover of power as a crucial moment to safeguard public knowledge. Typically, it's not newsworthy stuff. But there’s never been a transition quite like this.
According to a February 6 update from the Internet Archive, the current 2024-2025 preservation effort has already captured more than 500 terabytes of data, including more than 100 million unique government web pages, with the scope covering everything from .gov and .mil domains to government content hosted on .org and .edu sites.
These archivists have for years known the potential of the “digital dark ages” and the threat of homegrown authoritarians scrubbing the public record. While underfunded and working in obscurity, they’ve been building and maintaining the infrastructure to preserve truth itself. They’re the reason scientists can still access climate data that disappeared from EPA servers, why journalists can verify when federal agencies stealth-edit their missions and why future historians will be able to document exactly how a government tried to gaslight its way through erasing marginalized communities from the public record.
The thing to talk about over your next power lunch:
When the Internet Archive briefly went dark in October after a coordinated DDoS attack, it offered a glimpse of our possible future: a digital dark age where power means the ability to press delete on any inconvenient fact. Archives are quite literally democracy’s backup drive — but one that’s increasingly under attack precisely because it works.
As Freeland of the Internet Archive told ESC KEY .CO: “Archiving the web isn’t just about nostalgia — it’s about ensuring that future generations have access to the data, stories and perspectives that shape our world today.”
The real question in my mind is how we protect the archivists and their archives. When safeguarding public knowledge means weathering DDoS attacks and fending off clownish authoritarians who’d rather hit delete on reality, maybe it’s time we talked about how we collectively support and defend our cultural backup drives.
And one long thing to read:
This TL;DR Briefing builds on analysis from the essay I contributed to the Internet Archive's Vanishing Culture report last year, which I've republished in full here on ESC KEY .CO along with a new introduction about the broader attacks on libraries and archives that netizens need to keep an eye on:
JD Shadel
