This sounds like a great excuse to launch an archive with a bunch of proxies that automatically captures new New York Times articles and tracks changes over an exponential amount of time. Preferably with a built-in algorithm that diffs the articles.
I think many have also been wondering about version control of legislation/law documents for some time as well. But I never understand why it’s not realized yet.
I'm genuinely impressed by this being upvoted here. Big tech and powerful corporate/government interests are destroying our societies. This information needs to be checked and tracked.
This is useful for pointing out if a news site is manipulating a narrative, but for other things, I think news site should get the privacy they need to make stealth edits.
Like:
More recently, the Times stealth-edited an article that originally listed “death” as one of six ways “you can still cancel your federal student loan debt.” Following the edit, the “death” section title was changed to a more opaque heading of “debt won’t carry on.”
This was just poor wording. No reason sites shouldn’t have the peace of mind to change poor wording without being called out.
… What? No, if you need to edit poor wording you add a note establishing that the editor missed a section of poor wording, and that section has been revised.
You want to do stealth edits? We call those first drafts, and they arent published. Want to hide your edit history? Edit before you post.
While I agree in theory, it's hard practically to give the ability to make private wording and typo edits without giving the ability to make more insidious changes - like pushing a certain narrative and then quietly changing words here and there to erase evidence of that after most people have read it, etc.
If news websites kept their own visible audit trail, much like Wikipedia, I could see the argument that Internet Archive doesn't need to capture these articles immediately, maybe it should be time bound to a year after publication or somesuch, and therefore recent news could retain its paywall by the NYT without being sidestepped by Internet Archive. (While it's annoying that articles are paywalled, news sites do need to make money and pay for actual news reporters.)
It exists, it’s called a robots.txt file that the developers can put into place, and then bots like the webarchive crawler will ignore the content.
And therein lies the issue: if you place a robots.txt out for the content, all bots will ignore the content, including search engine indexers.
So huge publishers want it both ways, they want to be indexed, but they don’t want the content to be archived.
If the NYT is serious about not wanting to have their content on the webarchive but still want humans to see it, the solution is simple: Put that content behind a login! But the NYT doesn’t want to do that, since then they’ll lose out on the ad revenue of having regular people load their website.
I think in the case of the article here though, the motivation is a bit more nefarious, in that the NYT et al simply don’t want to be held accountable. So there’s a choice to be had for them, either retain the privilege of being regarded as serious journalism, or act like a bunch of hacks that can’t be relied upon.
But how do you determine what’s just ‘fixing poor wording’ and what’s actively hiding major bias or retcons of history?
Radio NZ got caught a year or so ago with a staffer who was editing articles syndicated from Reuters to be more pro-Russian. Should they be able to sweep that under the rug and claim it was only ever the one article they got caught on?
Likewise, bin Laden was originally hailed as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter. The articles relating to that are part of the historical record and kinda important.
Allowing the historical record to be retconned with impunity was probably the defining trait of 1984. It’s really not a path you want to go down.
You don’t and there’s no good way to reconcile my two opinions. I don’t disagree the archive should exist, I’m just saying, manipulating information is a valid reason, but the author’s bullying publishers for mistakes isn’t.
Horseshit. If your editor doesn’t catch the article that says “have the peasants considered suicide as a way out of debt bondage?” then you as a news outlet should absolutely have to live with what you published.
I don’t care how many times you edit your comment, but I also don’t trust you at all. Now, I don’t have to trust you because clearly I am not going to learn anything of value from you.
If you don’t care whether I trust you or not, this shouldn’t bother you.
Most Newspapers trade on their credibility. They should want to be trusted that they aren’t making material changes to their articles. Are you suggesting we leave it to them to decide for themselves what constitutes a material change?
When a news provider publishes something they should be able to be held to what they’ve said. That’s the nature of both publication and the responsibility that the press should be held to
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