I posted an earlier version of this on Subatack, so if you want to see the original, you’ll find it here.

#SaveTheArchive #WaybackMachine #PreserveTheWeb

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/rant/

The Wayback Machine — it’s more than a cartoon plot device!

I don’t post many political think-pieces or calls to action (here or anywhere), so humor me this once. The Internet Archive, aka The Wayback Machine, is a critical part of the spinal cord of democracy. It serves so many roles I don’t know where to begin: I have used it to recover my own website content after losing a site, to recover accidentally-deleted material from other sites, to see what certain websites looked like in the past, and to see how old a website really is, just for starters.

Each of those examples was fantastically helpful and valuable to me personally, and super easy to do, yet I was charged nothing for the service.

Recover seven years of weekly blogging after Xanga died and locked me out? Done.
Recover entire web pages after they and their local backups were deleted by a bright-eyed volunteer who didn’t understand how WordPress worked? Done.
Check a possible scam site to see whether it really has served customers for “many years”? Done.
See how a site’s web design has changed over the decades? No problem. Use the Wayback Machine.

It’s free and easy, and 100% accurate …as long as the website owner doesn’t add a little script of code to the site that asks the Internet Archive spiders not to crawl it. Then the Internet Archive obeys, and maintains no record of that site. it’s as if that site never existed…

So if security is more of a concern for you than findability, verifiability, and being included in an archive of the entire internet (well, the webby URL-addressed part anyway), then it’s easy to opt out, and many secure sites do.

Now, when I say it’s “100% accurate” I mean it just takes snapshots of every web page it’s not forbidden to crawl. It isn’t Ground News, it doesn’t pay any attention to the accuracy of the information on the page, only how it appears the moment the Wayback Machine crawled it.

Still, it’s truly amazing to have a historic record of nearly every public website on the internet. The Internet Archive / Wayback Machine is one of the least-appreciated but most-helpful parts of the World Wide Web.1

Especially for journalists.

The Wayback Machine is often the only way to see what a business, government, or political website looked like before it was censored, or updated, or evolved. Journalists writing about those changes have no other way of seeing how various web portals appeared before a drastic change, unless the Wayback Machine has archived that site on or before that particular date.

Look, you guys are writers, authors, editors, agents, publishers, publicists, smart people. If you’ve never heard of the Wayback Machine before, I’ve described it now. Use your imagination. In a world where entire government information sites are shut down without warning, revisionist histories clamber over one another to reframe and even completely rewrite our past, gaslighting about factual data is backed up with deepfake photos, fictitious data, and entire (new) websites, and exhaustive physical libraries become more and more rare (and don’t keep websites in their stacks anyway), where else is there to turn for a thorough and credible archive of the internet’s past?

In the first couple of years of the Trump Administration, thousands of webpages and entire government websites were removed.

“Yes, I know,” you say, “all the LGBTQ and climate-change stuff, right?”

Okay, yes, but also things like:

Census Bureau research/methodology pages — thousands of web pages removed.
CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) website archives/pages — thousands of pages deleted.
CDC (Centers for Disease Control) webpages — thousands of pages altered or removed, not just HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis data, disease information, diagnosis, and treatment pages.
Office of Justice Programs: At least 1,000 pages from the Office of Justice Programs were taken offline.
NIST Harassment Policy Page: More than twenty pages were removed from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, including its zero-tolerance harassment policy.
NOAA “Radar Next” Program Overview: Documents removed from NOAA servers.
National Ocean Service Contracts: Contract and cost data webpages removed.
USDA (US Department of Agriculture) Animal Welfare Inspection Reports: Data removed from web pages.
USDA climate-smart agriculture strategies — removed.

If you are concerned about climate change, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative is trying to track the tens of thousands of climate-science webpages and entire online databases that have vanished from US government servers, data that farmers once relied upon to make critical strategic decisions about what to plant, how to plant it, and when. The Wayback Machine is one of their tools to identify deleted sites, pages, and data that was once freely available to small farmers and big agro alike.

Of course, the Wayback Machine only gives you web pages from the past. New climate-smart agricultural data isn’t being posted anymore, though the Earth-observing satellites are still in orbit… good luck, food-growers. (I hear the Old Farmer’s Almanac is still in print.)

And it’s not just the Trump administration, that’s just a high-profile example. The Wayback Machine archives daily or weekly snapshots of all sorts of websites all around the world.

Hate your bank’s new website UI? Go to their old version in the Wayback Machine. Most links will still work (unless your bank really deleted and rewrote a huge chunk of their site, but that usually doesn’t happen. They just made their UI worse.)

Curious about how the Ukrainian and Russian government websites used to describe one another? The Wayback Machine can show you their site pages from before the war began (and from before Zelenskyy or Putin were elected).

It ain’t perfect…

The Internet Archive has gone through some rough times, and has attempted some sketchy things. One person’s freedom of information can be another person’s copyright violation, and the details really matter when things get complicated. Don’t confuse the Internet Archive with Google’s Project Gutenberg, which only digitizes and freely distributes public-domain books. The Internet Archive’s Open Library began digitizing and freely distributing copyrighted books published by major publishers, an obvious no-no.

Open Library was finally forced into compliance with copyright law, and the various legal challenges were settled. And hopefully the Internet Archive’s cybersecurity challenges too. You can read about both of those things here. Or here if you really want to dig deep into the lawsuits and their settlements.

…but it’s what we’ve got, and it’s good.

Open Library is fine if it complies with copyright law and only competes with Project Gutenberg, but that’s completely separate from the Wayback Machine. We all need the Wayback Machine. But we especially need it now that governments, corporations, random trolls and more are gaslighting us about “the way things have always been” and “what the news reporters at the scene actually said that day.” It’s more than the spinal cord of democracy and the third-party-verification for the legacy of our free press. It is a million-lumen searchlight that burns through all the gaslighting. It is a litmus test of reality that we cannot afford to sacrifice.

…note that anyone can search the Wayback Machine for free, it isn’t limited to journalists or scholars or hidden behind a daunting paywall like so many of the best online research tools—looking at you, JSTOR

Here’s my lightly edited version of the petition letter2 to either restore or pre-emptively protect Wayback Machine archiving of major news sites.

Feel free to print it and mail it to your congressional representative, or to someone at the New York Times, The Atlantic, USA Today, The Washington Post, The LA Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Chicago Tribune, and anywhere else you go to check the veracity of what you see online. If you do, please let me know. It will mean a lot to me. Message Nicolas Nelson

The Letter:

Dear leaders of major media outlets3,

The freedom of journalists isn’t only the freedom to write, it’s also the freedom to research, and the freedom to have your work read and remembered for generations to come. 2026 is the first International Press Freedom Day in thirty years that journalists’ work at major media outlets including the New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today is not being preserved by the independent nonprofit Internet Archive. We are calling on you, and on all news outlets, to publicly commit to working with the Internet Archive to keep the news in the Wayback Machine.

Since February of this year, the New York Times has told the Internet Archive to stop its Wayback Machine from preserving the work of its journalists. Meanwhile, Wired recently reported how USA Today is publishing powerful reporting that relies on the Wayback Machine, while ironically blocking it from archiving that same reporting. And when over a hundred journalists delivered a letter celebrating the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of journalism, generating a wave of tech-viral angst, the CEO of The Atlantic weighed in but didn’t commit to finding a solution. The concerns about AI that these publications cited as a reason to ban the Wayback Machine are wholly hypothetical. Journalists, and this nonprofit public good that they rely on, deserve better.

Though other websites use the word “archive” and try to style themselves as similar to the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine isn’t a flash-in-the-pan service to skip over paywalls. It has been preserving the news longer than many people who sign this petition have been alive. Generative AI is the worst excuse to hide principled reporting from fact-checkers. If anything, AI is the top reason why the Wayback Machine is more crucial than ever. The truth is that AI companies can easily do what knockoff archiving sites are doing: ignore the rules, ignore a robot’s .txt block, and grab the news off of publisher’s websites without their consent. There is little to stop them. There’s only one reason that the Internet Archive isn’t doing what most of Silicon Valley is: integrity. This integrity shows us that the Internet Archive is trustworthy and aims to operate for a very long time.

And it should. Censorship and authoritarianism are growing, along with pressure to alter reporting and erase facts. Journalists frequently face death threats, and many have died across the past year for their work. The least we can do out of respect during these horrors is to shore up the Wayback Machine’s neutral third party preservation efforts so these brave journalists’ work is not lost. Their reporting must remain accessible not only to their colleagues and loved ones, but to the eyes of history.

The Wayback Machine makes every online news outlet it archives more resilient against pressure to remove stories that threaten the powerful. It is in the interest of any news outlet (that still does real journalism) to champion such an ally in times like these. It shouldn’t be this hard to find a way to independently preserve the news. We call on the leadership of major media outlets to commit to working with the Internet Archive and getting all the news in the Wayback Machine now!

Sincerely,

[NOBLE PERSON WHO IS SENDING THIS.]4

/end rant/

…thanks for reading all the way to the end! Please do take action of some kind.

Write well and publish wisely,

—Nic

1 And it’s a nonprofit that doesn’t receive public funding. Consider supporting them financially. I do.

2 You can find the original here, but I thought they were a bit crass.

3 If you have time, google the name of someone important at that paper or agency and address it to them personally. This works great for printed paper letters, and for email too. Or leave it as-is and post it as an “open letter”.

4 Add your name or pen name and send this to decision-makers in media of all kinds. Don’t keep it as “noble person who is sending this” —that would be silly!