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Youtube and Facebook, while convenient, aren't really appropriate mediums for them to share this sort of footage. Liveleak comes to mind as a service better suited for a public repository of this video.

Archival of footage shouldn't be dependent on a third party platform that can, at will, delete every single video on a whim. Likely for this sort of thing a diligent archivist will need to put in the effort of storing it safely, because those videos will almost all end up being deleted on platforms that rely on ad revenue.

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Been wondering about this phenomenon for awhile. Spotify can delete music history. Youtube can delete video history. If it's on a streaming service it may as well not exist. We're at this strange point where convenience may as well be access, because the same service you used for discovery is the one for consumption. I don't know if this phenomenon has a name.

My feelings exactly.

You better start unthinking before you're the one getting put down the memory hole.

Likewise Amazon removing books from its site is much more effective than any book burning.

Fahrenheit 451, good movie about that. I just found out Amazon owns Goodreads. They also own IMDB.

An oft-overlooked aspect of Fahrenheit 451 is that it's everyday people that report others to the firemen in the book, very similar to how content is censored these days.

Goodreads will list any book for the time being, even ones banned from Amazon. One example is The Culture of Critique - the link to Amazon goes to a broken page, but links to buy it from other vendors remain.

Link to the book - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/182136.The_Culture_of_Cr...

You can buy them (or if curious, simply see which books have been banned) here http://www.unz.com/bookstore/

Long ago only very rich people or clergymen owned books. They were read out loud to the illiterate at gatherings.

During the Arab Spring I had savec gigabytes of Youtube footages of protests, because I 100% expected them to be removed.

"You should not show identifiable people being beaten!"

That's true, because it could go one way or another depending on whether the revolution succeeds. If it does, though, it can help identify the perpetrators of brutality.

Publishing it is irresponsible, but destroying them is as well. This is potential criminal evidences.

Exactly. You need something like Internet Archive or better that is archival quality, random internet vandalism-proof and FBI raid-proof.

Or even something more distributed. Like each public library has a storage cube and each cube has an overlapping portion of history. They checksum each other peer-to-peer to detect anyone trying to change history.

There are 110,000 public libraries in the United States. Plus thousands more private libraries. Seems like enough for U.S. history, at least.

Shouldn't be the public libraries though. Public libraries will not save certain videos. Especially if the local police or the guys in the blue windbreakers with three yellow letters on them show up.

Maybe that's a problem that everyone has? But it would be best if there was some offshore, FBI proof, kind of way to do this archiving.

Especially if the local police or the guys in the blue windbreakers with three yellow letters on them show up.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. After 9/11, the libraries were the first to stand up to the government's desperate search for information. The feds wanted everyone's lending history, and ended up backing off when the libraries put up a fight.

This is what BitTorrent and IPFS is for.

Those are ultimately transport and distribution systems.

At some point, you need curators and archivists.

I noticed a month or two ago that certain sites seem to be excluded even from internet archives like the Wayback Machine. The first example I stumbled on was Snopes. I only noticed because I saw a Snopes link on Reddit where the thumbnail was clearly different from the live version; the thumbnail appeared to show a human-like baby in the womb, whereas the live version had that edited out. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."

To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

This is how it works, yes.

----> Why isn't the site I'm looking for in the archive?

Some sites may not be included because the automated crawlers were unaware of their existence at the time of the crawl. It's also possible that some sites were not archived because they were password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or otherwise inaccessible to our automated systems. Site owners might have also requested that their sites be excluded from the Wayback Machine.

----> How can I exclude or remove my site's pages from the Wayback Machine?

You can send an email request for us to review to info@archive.org with the URL (web address) in the text of your message.

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004651732-Usin...

Not only that, if they are archived at one point and later decide to be excluded then all of the archives for that domain are deleted retroactively. This means that a valuable site can be archived for years but if the domain lapses and gets bought up by somebody who decides to exclude the Wayback Machine then all of that precious content is destroyed even though the destroyer never owned it!

I feel like we’re in the Internet equivalent of the early years of Hollywood. We’ve lost so many precious early movies because there were no backups of the film.

I don't think your interpretation of the latter case is quite right. In my understanding, the Archive is willing to disable display of the site content retroactively due to a new robots.txt, but they won't delete that content. It will still be present in their files.

What you’re describing may have been a recent change that I wasn’t aware of. If so, it’s at least some consolation. We could still do better.

I believe that that has been the case for the entire existence of Wayback, not just recently.

Deleted or not made available?

This policy was actually changed in 2017 to completely ignore robots.txt.

[0] https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

If the site goes down and the robots.txt becomes unavailable, the content will become available on internet archive.

They've recently made the process intentionally more annoying. You used to be able to exclude a site you control via a robots.txt file. That wouldn't actually delete archived content and would merely hide it from viewing. They no longer honor that approach. You now have to send them an email and specifically request content removal.

I consider this to be acceptable.

Most rational people would.

That approach allowed domain spammers to (unintentionally?) disable access to content that predates their ownership of the domain, so it was a garbage approach. In the current situation, a content owner can still achieve removal, but a subsequent owner of the domain cannot. That's how it should be. If I buy domain x, I should not be able to request the removal of content that was present on domain x before I owned it.

Snopes kept quietly making politically-motivated changes, and they kept getting caught. Now they can get away with it.

The Islamic State posted their content for many years on the Internet Archive. I believe IA did take down content in some cases.

Here's the thing, we're never likely to find a place that allows everything. I think most people understand that.

But to find a provider of public access to archives more expansive than YouTube's, well, that's improvement.

With IA, I feel that they probably de-listed the content but are hosting it for a time when it may be safer to reveal it as part of a greater historical record.

I somehow don't get the same impression from same impression from YouTube

Modern day jihadist groups are now utilizing Telegram, Whatsapp, and TikTok to preserve and spread material. It’s quite easy to gain access to them — i’ve heard — as many researchers are gaining access to these messages to preserve said materials. Plus these apps give them an ability to easily communicate transcontinentally.

Archive.is has constantly faced harassment from people filing DMCA claims and having domain names taken away for bullshit copyright claims.

I'm sure if they started doing this the Twitter outrage warriors wouldn't be happy about it and add to the difficulty of their job.

>the Twitter outrage warriors

Somebody should classify this as an addictive behavior.

'The immanent urge to get emotionally excited by interacting with an equally excitable peer group on issues only remotely related to one's personal life'.

Just in case there's confusion, the Internet Archive isn't Archive.is but Archive.org. They are 2 differents organizations.

Internet Archive seems to be handling this kind of trouble quite well.

> Archival of footage shouldn't be dependent on a third party platform that can, at will, delete every single video on a whim

Thankfully censorship-resistant anonymous p2p file sharing systems exist, I hope they become more popular for archival work.

> Liveleak comes to mind as a service better suited for a public repository of this video.

Liveleak, seriously? I'm not convinced that a site known for hosting gory and violent videos is really what these human rights activists are looking for.

[Edit] Some context: https://www.businessinsider.com/profile-of-hayden-hewitt-fou...

It comes to mind for that very reason. The rules for uploading to it are less stringent than other services because it's there to provide a platform for things that don't fit on other video platforms on the web. If you're going to be hosting videos of the horrors of war, it's much more likely to stick on liveleak than any other platform.

I agree that it works from a technology perspective, but from the product/marketing perspective it's a non-starter.

People who want to watch violent videos != human rights activists. There's the "blood and gore" people, and the "social justice warrior" people, and not a ton of overlap.

In order to solve this use case there would really need to be a site that combines LiveLeak's content moderation policy with an activist ethos.

The reason I'm suggesting it as an an alternative is because of its policies, not because the platform is a great place for discoverability. The intent isn't to help people find these videos, just that they are somewhere online where people can view them that's less likely to be taken down.

Or at least with a filtered tag that's fairly reliable. All around a pretty risky site for this use case along other considerations.

Liveleak very knowingly remove any content that will embarrass the US' military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex, also.

So they're not really a great example.

> I'm not convinced that a site known for hosting gory and violent videos is really what these human rights activists are looking for

You mean gory and violent videos like war crimes and human rights violations? Sounds like exactly the right site.

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