The Internet Is[n't] Forever
but it feels like misinformation and disinformation could be.
With today’s news that Mark Zuckerberg is ending Meta’s third-party fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram and suspending the already-nominal content moderation on both platforms, now might be a good time to remember that online, misinformation and disinformation travel farther and faster than the truth. If the last Republican administration is anything to go by, the gauntlet is about to get much more dire for dear old Veritas.
While there are always changes to government websites when a new administration takes office, the Silencing Science Tracker, a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, reports that between 2017 and 2021, roughly 1,400 changes to U.S. agency websites removed evidence-based information on environmental issues, with eighty percent of changes occurring immediately prior to or during regulatory proceedings. Access to accurate data, collected according to established standards, is obviously crucial beyond climate science or even academia at large—it’s essential for laypersons to fact-check assertions they might encounter in their everyday lives and have a concrete basis to advocate for themselves and their communities.
With just under two weeks until the transition, if you haven’t already printed, downloaded, or archived .gov websites and data you consider important, please do. And if you’re interested in supporting efforts to preserve essential data, here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of organizations you should check out:
End of Term Web Archive: preserves federal websites at the end of presidential administrations
Environmental Data and Governance Initiative: tracks changes to federal websites, including noting which data has been removed or altered
Climate Mirror: works to mirror public climate datasets
DataMirror: a project to mirror data.gov, the federal government’s primary research portal
If you know of similar efforts by other groups, please let me know.
Acta non verba.