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The White House has ordered thousands of government-owned websites to be removed from Wayback Machine during the past month, removing virtually all evidence of Federal agencies’ guidelines on important issues like sexual orientation, cases from January 6 and discrimination.
Since President Trump’s second day of inauguration, the administration’s massive elimination of policies and data they find objectionable has theillustrated the speed at which data is erased from the internet. In addition, it has brought an interest to preserve data online by digital Archivists.
Many pages on the site of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention were shut down in January to conform with executive orders issued by President Trump however, some of the pages are now on the web in response to an order by an Federal judge. Other sites that were removed are Justice Department web pages related to the January 6 2021 Capitol breach; details about treatment for transgender patients on Healthcare.gov and an information page about gender diversity on the website of the TSA and sexual orientation as well as general discrimination against individuals that are on both the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Census Bureau’s websites along with a host of other sites across the federal government.
Although it is not unusual for presidential administrations to take down or alter government websites however, the second Trump administration appears to have removed more pages than normal as per Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine, that the non-profit Internet Archive operates, is a tool that was created to aid in the preservation of online data and has been used in the past when administrations of presidents removed data from administrations prior to them. The site lets users type in an URL, and in the event that the webpage has been archived, look up what it was like in the past, going back to the beginning of the database in 1996.
“I think that many have reported that the scope of what we’re seeing this time – with regard to certain websites being taken offline, certain material on web pages being removed – is greater than it has been in past changes of administration,” Graham said. Graham.
The White House did not respond to a request for information.
“Whenever there’s a change in office – regardless of which parties or administrations are outgoing and incoming – it’s really important that we preserve government websites and information as a record,” said Rebecca Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. “And while there’s perhaps a greater sense of urgency at the moment, the work that’s happening is not brand new.”
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Go back in time via the internet using the aid of archives
When entering a URL into the Wayback Machine, users is able to view the dates the crawlers of the archive have saved the website and can select a time to visit.
The crawlers, computer programs, not insects, scour the internet to gather information and save websites. Users can also save the page by entering the URL into the Save Page Now section of the Wayback Machine site. The database has over 916 billion pages on the internet according to the website’s homepage.
The Internet Archive, in collaboration with other partners, including The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) and Stanford University Libraries, also provides an End of term archive, which collects and archives content from government sources at the conclusion of each presidential term that goes all the way to the year 2008.
There are many more archives websites, including some which focus exclusively on the preservation of government data.
“Preserving digital information is a challenge,” Frank said. Frank. “It requires active work, both to make the decision to preserve it, to capture it, and then to keep that information findable, accessible and usable over the long term.”
On the 6th of February On February 6, on February 6, Harvard Law Library Innovation Center has released its archive for data.gov, the government site that makes research data available for the public to download, including data from 2024 to 2025. The institution has previously made available other tools for archival including Perma.CC, which lets users make permanent URLs of websites they want to archive.
“We’ve built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone,” the lab posted in an blog article.
EDGI is also trying to keep the data of the government online. Following the inauguration of Donald Trump and his administration threw out the digital tool that indicated which areas in the US have a high amount of pollution. EDGI as well as some other participants of the Public Environmental Data Partners coalition uploaded an version of this tool made up of data that the coalition have stored. Gretchen Gehrke, a co-founder of EDGI has stated in a statement the group was “mobilizing resources to archive critical federal data.”
Content online is particularly vulnerable to be lost to the history of
Physical objects are fairly simple to store. Books, for instance can be printed in a variety of copies. After they’ve been printed, their content can’t be changed easily.
Information found on the internet however, is a lot easier to be lost. The content on a website is easily changed in non-detectable ways, or the pages could be removed completely.
In addition the internet is built on the URL which is a website that gives the address of information, not the information itself.
“It’s like, you know your house address,” Graham explained. “But you know that 10, years ago there was someone had lived there. What do you know about that? All you have is the address for your home.”
While independent archives like the Wayback Machine can help preserve otherwise-inaccessible pages, Johnny Hadlock, executive director of the National Association of Government Archives & Records Administrators, said in a statement that “government agencies must proactively incorporate archiving into their workflows to protect their online presence.”
A report by Pew Research released in May of this year found the 38% websites accessible in 2013 are no longer accessible 10 years after. The study also revealed that one-fifth of government websites have at the very least one broken link which is typically the result of the linked website is shut down.
“So much of what happens in the world is digital, and those records are sometimes government records, sometimes research data,” Frank said “But they’re valuable, and we should take care of them.”
