Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages
blog.archive.orgThis stuff makes me REALLY nervous. Its one thing to have a discussion about the here and now and debate what is true or not. There are plenty of very good fact checkers to help with this.
Wayback though is now going back and promoting a chosen context. History should be preserved for its integrity. If someone said something false let it stand on its own feet. Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true.
They say that victors write history, but that shouldn't be the goal.
> Let individuals look at the content and context and decide on their own if it is true
That is literally what they are doing. They are literally linking to context and other articles.
People can make up their own minds about Wayback Machine's content. They added even more information to help make up your mind on content that expresses a contentious opinion. That super helpful since I want to see as many sides as possible! Why would you want to censor that context unless you want to manipulate people into believe blatantly false misinformation?
Because the “context” is never fairly applied. I want a little bubble that lights up every time a Democrat says we’re cutting school funding and teachers are under paid. It would just be a chart showing that school funding has tripled since I was a kid and showing American teachers are paid higher than the OECD average. This is a bread-and-butter Democrat assertion that’s made literally everywhere, but fact checkers never add that “context.”
I looked up your statistics and the reason there is nobody calling it out is because, first, that's not the claim being made (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it) and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. In fact, the gap in lifetime earnings compared with other countries gets even bigger when you account for their lower starting salaries as well as lower total compensation (including benefits). Ironically, this is a great example of the system working and not propagating partisan "alternative facts" like what you want.
It's all projection. You just can't imagine people adding reasonable context to contentious information because you know that if you were in that position that you would abuse it like with your misleading teacher claim. Nobody is out to get you and no you are not a victim of some sort of liberal conspiracy. It won't hurt you if you get an occasional dose of reality injected back into your brain if you decide to browse the Wayback Machine during the next Fox News commercial break.
> (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it)
I've never seen this argument, and frankly, I don't really understand it -- what are "equivalently trained professions", and why all "equivalently trained professions" should be paid the same?
> and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading.
That's interesting, can you show me some data behind it? I haven't heard this one either.
> I've never seen this argument.
It's incredibly common. Even here on HN. I personally empathize with it because I'm a programmer and I'm quite certain much of the work I do provides less value than a decent teacher would _in the long term_.
Societies benefit from paying teachers more as:
- they deserve more
- higher salaries attract better teachers and actual domain experts who have little economic incentive to teach when they can make more elsewhere.
- a better educated workforce will pay for itself in the long run, although I think FUD over deficit spending isn't necessary here and would be fine if it eventually creates increased output/asset creation.
I am not claiming that these ideas are proven, just that I personally empathize with them. If you or anyone has research to counter or back up these claims that would be very helpful.
> the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it
I am not aware of any other profession where the statistical impact of training is not reliably distinguishable from zero so this is a thin reed to hang any argument on. If we’re going to reward people for the length of time they’ve been in training without regard for the value of their skills or outside demand that seems unjust. If no one wants to pay someone to be a minister or theologian after doing a Master’s in it that’s fine. Equally if someone is dissatisfied with the salary they earn, whether as a teacher, librarian, lawyer or bin man they are free to find other work.
> and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading.
Do you see how this turns into editorial really fast?
The WaPo and Politifact are particularly trash "fact check" brands. They're pure editorials.
edit: To hopefully ward off reflexive political downvotes: my politics are the opposite of rayiner's, I have the opposite opinion on what teacher pay should be, and certainly would argue about what the historical record shows about it. I wouldn't have my argument pop up in a tooltip when you mouse over rayiner's comment, and I certainly wouldn't call it a "fact check."
For the record, I agree with the general point of your comment - my concern is primarily that calling things "trash" tends to degrade the quality of discussion.
I only say it because I mean it. It's important to distinguish "fact checks" that are bad because the "fact check" label is bad from "fact checks" that are intentionally misleading and usually contain more misinformation than the statements they're purporting to correct.
Adding context and giving suggestions for additional material is something librarians and museum curators have done probably since the dawn of the profession, and it’s all I can see happening here. I’m really struggling with your take that this is somehow a new or bad development.
Have you ever been to a library and asked for help finding something and received a suggestion that if you are looking to read X, you might also want to read Y? Have you ever been to a museum and seen a placard next to an object describing its historical significance? How is this somehow different? Because it’s “on the internet”?
IA is not compelling anyone to click on the link to PolitiFact, or the link to the report on foreign interference, or the link to the Medium content policy. They aren’t deleting or rewriting the content of the page. They’re attaching a link.
Do you think that a book or a documentary destroys the “integrity” of the original material by adding a non-destructive narration or voice over that offers extra context?
How could someone can even do what you want, to “look at the content and context”, if IA doesn’t provide any context?
I've been to libraries that offer context, recommendations, etc, but that doesn't seem like a very close analogy here. I've never seen a library book with a warning on the cover saying the librarians think it contains false claims, and if a library did apply such labels I'd be worried about how willing they are to continue stocking those books.
How close does the analogy need to be in order for you to feel comfortable that what Internet Archive are doing is not at all dangerous or unprecedented? While you may not have encountered it, some libraries do label books for content[0]:
> Some libraries block access to certain materials by placing physical or virtual barriers between the user and those materials. For example, materials are sometimes labeled for content or placed in a “locked case,” “adults only,” “restricted shelf,” or “high-demand” collection.
(emphasis mine)
Here’s another real-world example. In the physical world, book publishers often print updated editions of books with corrections, distribute errata, attach disclaimers[1], and sometimes recall books entirely[2]. (If you feel the urge to split hairs here about how one entity is a third-party publisher and the other is a third-party library, please think seriously on how this distinction is relevant to adding context.)
The concerns that the ALA have with labelling in the physical world don’t apply to what IA is doing, since IA are not creating barriers for patrons to access content, they are just adding context—as book publishers, museum curators, librarians, film distributors, documentarians, historians, and others have done for centuries.
[0] http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpret...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/business/media/publisher-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/naomi-wolf-outrages...
I generally trust that librarians take the attitude towards categorization and labeling that your source presents, as a neutral exercise that has to be done for practical concerns. Some people will "be predisposed to think of labeled and filtered resources as objectionable", but that's wrong, and the library has a duty to try and structure things to minimize that incorrect predisposition. That doesn't seem to be the attitude the Internet Archive is taking here - information like "this article was part of a disinformation campaign" or "this article was banned by Medium" is relevant only to the extent that it discourages people from reading it or believing what it has to say.
Some of the practices you're describing in book publishing do bother me. I have no issue with the author of a work making corrections, errata, disclaimers, etc. But when a publisher agrees to publish a book, and then reneges because they don't agree with its contents, I find that disturbing.
I also own a lot of books that contain a lot of falsehoods. I wonder if there will be an inspector.
The lesson of the past ten years should be that most people are incapable of looking at the content and context and deciding on their own if it is true, and additionally are being subjected to a constant barrage of paid-for (whether by advertisers, corporate interests, or state actors) psychologically manipulative content.
I'm unsure about this and I don't know the answer -- but it's definitely not Present All Things As If They Were Equally Valid.
Ah yes we should make sure we tell people The Truth, with warnings on Not Truth, such that they don't make Wrong Decisions.
The next step will be to "sanitize" Wrong Think from the archive, lest some poor easily convinced soul be led to it.
Your first sentence could be a literal description of the concept of education: telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions.
Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing group-think.
I do not have to trust my teachers on what the answer is to a math problem: I can check it. Likewise for history - I can refer back to the sources they are quoting from. One lesson we've learned in the West is that often times our understanding of an event evolves - much of what I learned in history class we consider to be incorrect today.
Education is not telling someone what is true or not true, it is to train the methods of discovering truth and disproving lies. It is critical thought.
A fact check, and more egregiously censorship directly is against critical thought. It tells us that most humans are not fit for handling complicated problems or balancing sources - that instead we must trust some other authority to do that. It does not require a long search through the history book to find egregious mistakes by every journalistic outlet running today - including those purporting to be fact checkers.
If humans are unfit to engage critically with diverse information than so are the fact checkers. There is no human who is so trained and intelligent as to be unerring in their judgements and fact findings.
History doesn't repeat, but it has it's tropes. The well-intentioned erosion of freedom of speech and the subsequent censorship is not new. It will get worse before it gets better.
> telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions.
That's also what Scientologists claim to be doing.
Why do you feel like the appropriate way to respond to a comment pointing out a bad faith argument is to reply with another bad faith argument?
Because its not a bad faith argument to point out that even people who are obviously wrong think of themselves as the sources of truth. I actually thought it would be a little aggressive to point out that "telling people the truth and warning them about false truths" is not what education is. Education is a lot more complicated than that. What that is is a literal description of propaganda from the perspective of the true-believer propagandist.
No, the bad faith part was using an infamous pseudo-religion as a thought-terminating cliché instead of just saying what you said much more clearly and eloquently in this reply. :-)
Propaganda isn’t “telling people the truth and warning them about false truths”. Propaganda is spreading a message, even if it’s known to be false, in order to induce a desired behaviour. It does not care about the truth, it does not care about the wrong decision, it cares only for a specific outcome and uses any message possible to achieve that outcome.
If the point of education is not to tell people the truth and warn them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions, what is the point of education?
> No, the bad faith part was using an infamous pseudo-religion as a thought-terminating cliché instead of just saying what you said much more clearly and eloquently in this reply. :-)
This is not a compliment, this is doubling down on saying I was arguing in bad faith. Scientology is an excellent baseline for nonsense, not a thought-terminating cliché. I also use flat-earthers: if your argument would work just as well for flat-earthers, it's an empty argument.
In school, I was taught the tools to get my computer to do what I said and how to read. Not the truth, and what to ignore, except in history or social studies class. Needless to say, what I was taught in history and social studies in the 80s was propaganda, even the true parts.
I suspect the next step will be to license journalists, with a background check searching for Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, Cuban and Iranian connections.
I think I've seen this movie before. You better start grabbing from the archive what you don't want to be lost forever.
archivebox is a self hosted wayback machine that is easy to setup and very robust.
You are right. It looks like we won't be enjoying freedoms (of speech) on archive.org for much longer.
It seems that the leadership of archive.org is completely broken. First was the stupid stunt of saying they were a library and lending out unlimited digital copies, when it was pretty obvious that doing that would lead to huge copyright issues. Now it is this, moving them from being just an archiver of information to a commenter on information as well as an archiver and jumping headfirst into the culture wars.
I don’t want archive.org to be an exciting organization. I want it to be a boring organization that just archives as much of the internet as they can plausibly can.
It seems that current leadership is not content with being that.
The leadership could have been compromised in some way.
We all know how this is going to end up. It always starts with fact checking and then moves on to removing articles that are wrong.
In between now and that end point, it is neither one beast nor another. It is a partially flag corpus in which some articles are meta labelled for fact checking and some aren't.
Who gets to choose which articles are scrutinised and which aren't?
Who asked for this?
Those who in their hearts dream themselves our masters - https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE
Politically motivated organizations.
China.
It's all down hill from here!