6 ms·

A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?

74 points by greenburger 4y ago

bell-cot 4y ago
Sure sounds like, this time, Betteridge is wrong and the answer is "yes". If so...well, it was both legal and cheap, and plenty of people with money would have had good (as in "self-serving") reason to do it. Sadly - but predictably - the Washington Post story ends with "whoever did this horrible thing had a good lawyer, and covered their tracks well". Zero hint that anything could actually be done to guard against more such bad things happening. Let alone that anyone should get off their "click headline, read story, get angry, repeat" butt and try to do something. Pro Tip: If you're selling / downsizing / closing a web site that's full of important information (for history, public interest, etc.), then you should consider donating it to a library with the resources to keep it on-line. Or at least keeping a copy, and put in a clause into the sale contract about free & easy public access having to continue. Or any public library being allowed to also host it, free, if they chose to do so.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  The Washington Post story lists several theories and puts the spotlight in a bad thing that may have happened here. Hopefully that will inspire other investigators to keep digging. Newspaper reporters are not given infinite resources to chase stories. If you want to get off your butt I’m sure you could probably contribute to the investigation yourself. It seems very amenable to volunteer “OSINT” type of research from dedicated volunteers.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    Sounds like we have rather different philosophies about "try to do something". Once it is established that the takedown was either completely legal, or very easily could have been - then my attitude is that spending further resources on a "takedown whodunnit" investigation is about like tracking an escaped horse from the open barn door to the highway, where it was hit and killed by a truck. Beyond a little story to tell, you probably won't have much to show for the effort. My notion of "doing something" is more about closing the damned barn door, before more horses get out. The Washington Post would need ~zero reporter resources to clearly make that point. Maybe throw in a kudo to some lawmaker who's trying to help on that front, or some old-newspaper-story preservation effort.
    - matthewdgreen 4y ago
      I'm not exactly sure what you're proposing to do here. This case involves a private media archive being sold to a private buyer, with said private buyer (potentially) using the purchase to suppress older reporting. An obvious immediate fix would be to eliminate the incentives that drive this behavior, i.e., ensure that the Streisand Effect makes this approach worthless. Specifically: if this buyer is attempting to "catch and kill" stories by purchasing and destroying the archive, then a good fix is to ensure that there is new reporting that undermines the purchaser's goal and actually drives more attention to their activities. Indeed, far from being something to complain about, this Washington Post story seems like the first step in achieving exactly that goal. It now needs to be followed up by further investigation that identifies the specific individual(s) at issue so they can be explicitly named and shamed. Your alternative approach is what exactly? Clearly you're correct that posting the archives to a public library would have been better. But I'm not sure how to force for-profit publishers to do this in the past (impossible) or even in the future.
pessimizer 4y ago
Historical scandals are constantly being rewritten (largely by deletion) on the internet. It's even very hard to find details on the robosigning scandals from 2008, which were huge and recent.
- BMc2020 4y ago
  Marion Stokes secretly recorded 70,000 VHS tapes' worth of US broadcasts from 1979 until her death in 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-48190528 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-48190528
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  I've taken to pack-ratting information on private infrastructure, the constant editing of history was making me question my own memory.
- ajross 4y ago
  There's literally a wikipedia page on it with dozens of live references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure... Add to that the fact that all the court cases resulting from enforcement actions are public and... I don't understand your point at all. This is very well documented and understood from the perspective of a historian. I think you're confusing "very hard to find details" with "People Don't Agree With Me That This is Important". I mean, it's a technical and boring financial scandal which was mostly victimless at the level of individuals (the "victims" got big mortgages they otherwise couldn't qualify for!). It's just not surprising that this fades from public memory. But that's on all of us, not the recordkeeping.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Of course there's a wikipedia page on it, it was huge and recent. There are also web pages on it, mostly on lawyer's personal websites, and articles about continued robosigning that reference it. It was a multibillion dollar scandal involving multiple banks and multiple court cases that stretched over the net decade. I repeat, it's hard to find detailed information about a major historical event. > I think you're confusing "very hard to find details" with "People Don't Agree With Me That This is Important". Nothingburger, I guess. > t's a technical and boring financial scandal which was mostly victimless at the level of individuals Absolutely bonkers statement. Every robosigned document represented an individual whose house was in danger. > It's just not surprising that this fades from public memory. It is surprising that the hundreds of articles written about it at the time are gone, and we're getting history from law firm ads. Why is information available on the sites of law firms? Because this was a widespread fraud that affected individuals, and they needed lawyers. > But that's on all of us, not the recordkeeping. What? ----- Edit: I'm talking about people working to get information removed from the internet, and you're talking about memory. Very few people remember this one woman being raped, so is it "on all of us" that the accused pulled a newspaper off the internet? Additionally, the robosigning scandal disappearing is just an egregious example that I assumed everyone would be familiar with. There are any number of smaller profile financial scandals involving billions of dollars and huge institutions where the participants are still active in industry and public life. They're often completely obliterated from the web, and you can only find reference to the fallout on ancient sites that have been left on the internet due to neglect, filled with dead links that need to be fished from archive.org.
coldtea 4y ago
It's rich (pun intended) for the WP to be posting this, where one of the richest men in the world, with several huge interests and government deals to promote, paid to own it...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ajross 4y ago
  This kind of criticism gets tiresome. Someone has to own these companies and pay the journalists. If they're private, then they're "owned" and suspect. If they're publicly traded, then they're beholden to "Wall Street". If they're publicly funded, they're "propaganda". Please criticize the work, not the incentives[1]. In this case it seems like a pretty darn good piece of public interest journalism. Do you disagree? [1] Example: Elon Musk banning journalists out of personal pique is a terrible thing, not because "Billionaires shouldn't own Twitter" (even though many people believe that to be true) but because censorship, especially censorship of inconvenient journalism, is evil.
  - kodah 4y ago
    Ignore the incentives and marvel at the output sounds dangerous and irresponsible. Maybe it's tiresome to you and that's okay - not everyone has the emotional bandwidth or energy to care about everything. There are a good number of things on this board that I entirely write off, but I'm glad somebody cares - you never know when it'll be useful to take these things into account given that they're often part of a long strategy. I also disagree with your categorization of owned vs propaganda. People on HN generally respect NPR as well as many "owned" outlets. WaPo is just notable because Jeff has a history of developing a master plan years in advance where all his components are critical and subtle.
    - ajross 4y ago
      I ask again: do you have criticism of the linked article? Is it wrong or misleading? Clearly you think we shouldn't read it because of hypocrisy or something, but I have a hard time understanding why ignoring stories like this wouldn't make the world a worse place and not a better one.
asplake 4y ago
Sent down the memory hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole
alsetmusic 4y ago
This is why the Wayback Machine is valuable.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Even the WBM isn't immune. Information can be unpublished. I'm not convinced it cannot be entirely deleted given sufficient legal pressure.
drbeast 4y ago
If anyone bothers to RTFA, there's a blurb in there about the 2004 UVA rape case and a hint that a former victim of the false accusation (now an investment banker) bought the archive, DMCA'd links to the archive, and then took it all down. Dare I say, dangerously based.
- waffleiron 4y ago
  The accusation hasn’t been proven false, and even if it was then nuking a whole newspaper archive is a lot of collateral damage.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  *2014
marcosdumay 4y ago
Copyrights killed the content, not whoever brought the paper. If you make it illegal to archive the news, the news don't get archived.
- tootie 4y ago
  I work in news and can confirm. We have a news archive going back to some previous cohorts of editors who were less professional than the current one and we get hit with a lot of copyright trolling. It's barely worth the effort to fight and even basic compliance is costly. I'm guessing a purely archived site doesn't have any resources to answer complaints.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Whomever bought the paper leveraged copyright and the exclusive rights afforded under it to accomplish that goal.

74 points by greenburger 4y ago

Sure sounds like, this time, Betteridge is wrong and the answer is "yes". If so...well, it was both legal and cheap, and plenty of people with money would have had good (as in "self-serving") reason to do it. Sadly - but predictably - the Washington Post story ends with "whoever did this horrible thing had a good lawyer, and covered their tracks well". Zero hint that anything could actually be done to guard against more such bad things happening. Let alone that anyone should get off their "click headline, read story, get angry, repeat" butt and try to do something. Pro Tip: If you're selling / downsizing / closing a web site that's full of important information (for history, public interest, etc.), then you should consider donating it to a library with the resources to keep it on-line. Or at least keeping a copy, and put in a clause into the sale contract about free & easy public access having to continue. Or any public library being allowed to also host it, free, if they chose to do so.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
The Washington Post story lists several theories and puts the spotlight in a bad thing that may have happened here. Hopefully that will inspire other investigators to keep digging. Newspaper reporters are not given infinite resources to chase stories. If you want to get off your butt I’m sure you could probably contribute to the investigation yourself. It seems very amenable to volunteer “OSINT” type of research from dedicated volunteers.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Sounds like we have rather different philosophies about "try to do something". Once it is established that the takedown was either completely legal, or very easily could have been - then my attitude is that spending further resources on a "takedown whodunnit" investigation is about like tracking an escaped horse from the open barn door to the highway, where it was hit and killed by a truck. Beyond a little story to tell, you probably won't have much to show for the effort. My notion of "doing something" is more about closing the damned barn door, before more horses get out. The Washington Post would need ~zero reporter resources to clearly make that point. Maybe throw in a kudo to some lawmaker who's trying to help on that front, or some old-newspaper-story preservation effort.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    I'm not exactly sure what you're proposing to do here. This case involves a private media archive being sold to a private buyer, with said private buyer (potentially) using the purchase to suppress older reporting. An obvious immediate fix would be to eliminate the incentives that drive this behavior, i.e., ensure that the Streisand Effect makes this approach worthless. Specifically: if this buyer is attempting to "catch and kill" stories by purchasing and destroying the archive, then a good fix is to ensure that there is new reporting that undermines the purchaser's goal and actually drives more attention to their activities. Indeed, far from being something to complain about, this Washington Post story seems like the first step in achieving exactly that goal. It now needs to be followed up by further investigation that identifies the specific individual(s) at issue so they can be explicitly named and shamed. Your alternative approach is what exactly? Clearly you're correct that posting the archives to a public library would have been better. But I'm not sure how to force for-profit publishers to do this in the past (impossible) or even in the future.

pessimizer 4y ago

Historical scandals are constantly being rewritten (largely by deletion) on the internet. It's even very hard to find details on the robosigning scandals from 2008, which were huge and recent.

BMc2020 4y ago
Marion Stokes secretly recorded 70,000 VHS tapes' worth of US broadcasts from 1979 until her death in 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-48190528 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-48190528
cjbgkagh 4y ago
I've taken to pack-ratting information on private infrastructure, the constant editing of history was making me question my own memory.
ajross 4y ago
There's literally a wikipedia page on it with dozens of live references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure... Add to that the fact that all the court cases resulting from enforcement actions are public and... I don't understand your point at all. This is very well documented and understood from the perspective of a historian. I think you're confusing "very hard to find details" with "People Don't Agree With Me That This is Important". I mean, it's a technical and boring financial scandal which was mostly victimless at the level of individuals (the "victims" got big mortgages they otherwise couldn't qualify for!). It's just not surprising that this fades from public memory. But that's on all of us, not the recordkeeping.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Of course there's a wikipedia page on it, it was huge and recent. There are also web pages on it, mostly on lawyer's personal websites, and articles about continued robosigning that reference it. It was a multibillion dollar scandal involving multiple banks and multiple court cases that stretched over the net decade. I repeat, it's hard to find detailed information about a major historical event. > I think you're confusing "very hard to find details" with "People Don't Agree With Me That This is Important". Nothingburger, I guess. > t's a technical and boring financial scandal which was mostly victimless at the level of individuals Absolutely bonkers statement. Every robosigned document represented an individual whose house was in danger. > It's just not surprising that this fades from public memory. It is surprising that the hundreds of articles written about it at the time are gone, and we're getting history from law firm ads. Why is information available on the sites of law firms? Because this was a widespread fraud that affected individuals, and they needed lawyers. > But that's on all of us, not the recordkeeping. What? ----- Edit: I'm talking about people working to get information removed from the internet, and you're talking about memory. Very few people remember this one woman being raped, so is it "on all of us" that the accused pulled a newspaper off the internet? Additionally, the robosigning scandal disappearing is just an egregious example that I assumed everyone would be familiar with. There are any number of smaller profile financial scandals involving billions of dollars and huge institutions where the participants are still active in industry and public life. They're often completely obliterated from the web, and you can only find reference to the fallout on ancient sites that have been left on the internet due to neglect, filled with dead links that need to be fished from archive.org.

coldtea 4y ago

It's rich (pun intended) for the WP to be posting this, where one of the richest men in the world, with several huge interests and government deals to promote, paid to own it...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ajross 4y ago
This kind of criticism gets tiresome. Someone has to own these companies and pay the journalists. If they're private, then they're "owned" and suspect. If they're publicly traded, then they're beholden to "Wall Street". If they're publicly funded, they're "propaganda". Please criticize the work, not the incentives[1]. In this case it seems like a pretty darn good piece of public interest journalism. Do you disagree? [1] Example: Elon Musk banning journalists out of personal pique is a terrible thing, not because "Billionaires shouldn't own Twitter" (even though many people believe that to be true) but because censorship, especially censorship of inconvenient journalism, is evil.
- kodah 4y ago
  Ignore the incentives and marvel at the output sounds dangerous and irresponsible. Maybe it's tiresome to you and that's okay - not everyone has the emotional bandwidth or energy to care about everything. There are a good number of things on this board that I entirely write off, but I'm glad somebody cares - you never know when it'll be useful to take these things into account given that they're often part of a long strategy. I also disagree with your categorization of owned vs propaganda. People on HN generally respect NPR as well as many "owned" outlets. WaPo is just notable because Jeff has a history of developing a master plan years in advance where all his components are critical and subtle.
  - ajross 4y ago
    I ask again: do you have criticism of the linked article? Is it wrong or misleading? Clearly you think we shouldn't read it because of hypocrisy or something, but I have a hard time understanding why ignoring stories like this wouldn't make the world a worse place and not a better one.

asplake 4y ago

Sent down the memory hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

alsetmusic 4y ago

This is why the Wayback Machine is valuable.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Even the WBM isn't immune. Information can be unpublished. I'm not convinced it cannot be entirely deleted given sufficient legal pressure.

drbeast 4y ago

If anyone bothers to RTFA, there's a blurb in there about the 2004 UVA rape case and a hint that a former victim of the false accusation (now an investment banker) bought the archive, DMCA'd links to the archive, and then took it all down. Dare I say, dangerously based.

waffleiron 4y ago
The accusation hasn’t been proven false, and even if it was then nuking a whole newspaper archive is a lot of collateral damage.
LarryMullins 4y ago
*2014

marcosdumay 4y ago

Copyrights killed the content, not whoever brought the paper. If you make it illegal to archive the news, the news don't get archived.

tootie 4y ago
I work in news and can confirm. We have a news archive going back to some previous cohorts of editors who were less professional than the current one and we get hit with a lot of copyright trolling. It's barely worth the effort to fight and even basic compliance is costly. I'm guessing a purely archived site doesn't have any resources to answer complaints.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Whomever bought the paper leveraged copyright and the exclusive rights afforded under it to accomplish that goal.