Yes you heard that right, after the fact-check additions from Twitter and Instagram, the Wayback Machine will now also start fact-checking. The new feature was announced in one blogpost.
Clarify
According to Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, the organization felt the need for this feature after noticing a number of fact-checking groups linking to archived versions of pages.
“We try to preserve our digital history, but recognize the problems of accessing false and misleading information from a variety of sources,” Graham wrote in the post. “By providing useful links to contextual information, we hope our users will better understand what they are reading in the Wayback Machine.”
Basically, due to organizations turning up old, outdated information to expose, the Internet Archive felt it was important that the Wayback Machine provide that context on the archived pages themselves.
Countering fake news
The announcement featured examples of the Wayback Machine’s fact-checking annotations. A yellow bar appears at the top of the archived page informing the user that a fact check has taken place. A link to the article with the actual check is included in the label.
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There is one example that the Internet Archive gave that is very relevant at the moment. The Wayback Machine can be a great resource to revisit material that was originally posted on social media but taken down for policy violations. In this example, a Medium post promoting COVID-19 misinformation was removed from the Medium platform as a result of one of those policy violations. The Wayback Machine will now display a label stating that the page was removed as a result of breaking that platform’s rules.
Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is the largest online archive of digital material maintained by the non-profit Internet Archive. Users can search for almost any web page and find an archived version of that page, in some cases even your old Hyves page. Some websites have multiple versions of the archived pages, allowing you to travel back in time and see what a particular web page looked like at a particular point in history.
The fact-check labels are a good step forward in fighting fake news, but they also say something about the state of the internet when even an archival library needs them …
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