
Censorship on the Internet Archive by requiring login - drummer
https://blog.kareldonk.com/censorship-on-the-internet-archive-by-requiring-login/
======
CodeWriter23
Article doesn’t even delve into the possibility of this being used to track
dissenters. Not that I think the Internet Archive is in that business, but the
mere existence of such a list is to invite a subpoena.

------
knaik94
Unless the search results themselves are hidden without a login, I don't see
how this is censorship. The point of the archive is to preserve information
for the foreseeable future. Isn't that the opposite of censorship?

It seems more like a way to limit the Internet Archive being used to spread
bad and harmful information. The Archive didn't delete the content. To imply
that the IA is going to start being politically motivated in removing the
content misses the entire purpose of what the IA stands for.

Propaganda and other forms of misinformation is worth preserving and studying.
Requiring a login stops no one from access to the videos, it's a free sign up.

~~~
drummer
Considering that a few seconds in delay of loading a website has an impact on
visitors staying, what do you think happens when they are required to jump
through registration hoops to get to the content? The thumbnails are also
blurred. Why? These are tactics to censor content in a subtle way without
outright deleting or hiding it, which would be too obvious.

------
RunningDroid
>It’s a shame that even the Internet Archive, of all websites, is now
apparently also listening to Big Tech when it comes to what information should
be allowed on the Internet.

I personally think China or the US government are more likely suspects given
they can pass laws that effect the Internet Archive.

~~~
drummer
I highly doubt it; the video of the doctors in question was not censored by
the US government. And the Internet Archive is already entirely blocked in
China.

------
hedora
How hard is it to copy the internet archive, assuming you have the network
bandwidth and storage?

Centralized control of it has always been a single point of failure.

~~~
msla
It's big enough you'd need to arrange to go over there with trucks full of
data storage and copy it over in person. It's very large and constantly
growing, especially subsets like the Wayback Machine, but I'd guess the video
archives are growing faster than they'd allow you to copy them out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive)

> the archive's over 48 petabytes of digitized materials.

... and they'd likely have to rate-limit your downloads after a certain point
so you don't saturate the connection and cut off everyone else.

