CounterSpin interview with Lia Holland on the Internet Archive. “Janine Jackson: A recent report by Wired‘s Kate Knibbs leads with the contradiction: USA Today published a story recently on how ICE is misinforming about its detainment policies, a case that the paper built on data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a nonprofit digital library that preserves webpages. At the same time, USA Today bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. Along with outlets like the New York Times, the paper is trying to block the Internet Archive project from doing their job of preserving reporting. So what’s going on here? Here to catch us up is Lia Holland, a social artist, writer and activist, and campaigns and communications director at the group Fight for the Future.

• JJ: Please fill out our understanding a little more of what the Wayback Machine is and does. It seems like, particularly in these times, a critical information resource.
• LH: Absolutely. And that’s why my organization is so engaged with this issue. The Wayback Machine, for 30 years this year, has been the best and most reliable archive for preserving our digital lives, culture, recording and history. They archive nearly 5 million links on Wikipedia to news articles, and are a trusted resource for journalists all around the globe to investigate everything from corruption, to report on culture, to really do their jobs. And, unfortunately, that is under threat now.
• JJ: Let’s talk about what’s happening now. What is the crisis, if you will, and why is it of particular concern? You’ve tipped it, but why is it of particular concern for what I have seen called “accountability journalism,” but I think is just journalism?
• LH: Yeah. Most journalists do work to hold the powerful to account. And I think that that is a part of the factor in what’s happening in this moment.
• So since February, the Wayback Machine has not been able to archive the New York Times. And there are other major publications like this that have told them to stop preserving all of their journalism. And this is happening for reasons that I can only speculate on, but it seems that many of these major media outlets are very interested in packaging up their content to sell for AI training, and they’re concerned that sharing it with the Internet Archive somehow weakens their product, or weakens their stance on whether or not AI training is a copyright violation in various lawsuits…”