Is The Web Being Scrubbed? Internet Archive Offline, Q Warned In Post

Censorship is becoming the new normal as social media platforms ramp up control.

Internet Archive isn’t archiving since October 8, Google Cache has stopped caching, and Alexa’s web traffic ranking service discontinued.

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/1dCu0DqN3a

— AF Post (@AFpost) November 1, 2024

Brownstone Institute reports:

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

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As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions. 

Internet Archive has not been archiving since 10/8.

Google Cache has stopped caching.

The Alexa service – the one that used to rank web traffic (not the Amazon virtual assistant) is gone.

The ability of censors to memory-hole the internet is growing.https://t.co/o8OVWXqbH3

— GeroDoc (@doc_gero) October 31, 2024

Internet Archive and Google have intentionally stopped new website caching to hide what they’re about to do next.

Someone told us to 'Archive Offline'. In fact they mention it in 5 separate posts spanning the time of several years. Almost as if the playbook was known. The more… pic.twitter.com/JY2qTv04Ub

— Anonymous Patriot (@0331online) November 2, 2024