Google announced last week that it is terminating its little-used social network. People who liked Google Plus as an alternative to Facebook and Pinterest are out of luck and their content will be deleted.
Over the years, quite a few online services that I’ve used have gone belly up. You can never be sure which web services will survive the test of time.
The same goes for media online. A few news organizations do a good job archiving their content and making it discoverable online. Many others have let libraries of digital content disappear, creating dead weblinks everywhere.
The Internet Archive announced earlier this month that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the group’s Wayback Machine.
The non-profit organization is working to build and preserve an internet library. It will offer permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
I applaud the Internet Archive and Wikipedia for the great work they are doing.
Often online articles disappear out of neglect, because an organization changes its content management system and doesn’t bother to transfer over older articles.
More recently social media services have started censoring the information members post to their networks.
Facebook announced last week that it has deleted 559 pages and 251 accounts that it claims were breaking its rules against spam and “inauthentic” behavior. The purge impacted some pages that had legitimate political speech. Those include the Free Thought Project and Police the Police, Reason reported.
This is a disturbing development since so much of the free speech debate today has shifted to online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Photo: Wikipedia mosaic (Internet Archive)
No comments:
Post a Comment