Addie Robertson
Appearances
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
So Trump signed a couple of executive orders, one of which defined officially the idea that there are only two genders, male and female. And another one that ends, quote unquote, diversity, equity and inclusion in the government.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
And so the result here has been that more or less across the government, in addition to the kind of thing that we saw in the first Trump administration, which included purging information about climate change and some other general climate related issues, we've seen just a massive cut of anything that involves racial equity or transgender people or really anything that is sort of a subject of Republican culture wars.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
Reporters noticed it. People who used the information on these sites, which included data on the CDC or even transportation statistics, they have ended up uncovering a lot of this. And from there, the way that the Trump administration has mostly addressed it is in response to lawsuits. That there were claims that they deleted this data improperly.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
There was a court order that required them to put it back up. And they have responded by putting it back up with a big banner that says, we reject this information. We were forced to keep it online. But it violates something like, say, our dictate that there are only two sexes. So we find it unscientific or we find it against our policies.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
First of all, just for context, every time there is a new presidential administration, there is data that changes, there are priorities, there are new programs or old programs that get retired. So it's not necessarily surprising that some things have changed. But we have, as part of this, seen just a massive and really unprecedented change.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
deletion of information, including information that is required for people to do their jobs outside of the White House. And so it's a really huge issue right now. I don't think we've ever seen this kind of scale of data purging, especially of records and scientific research.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
Obviously, the first Trump administration deleted some data in ways that seemed very ideological, aimed at suppressing information about climate change.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
And obviously there have been pages that just disappeared at the end of terms, but that tended to be more about oversight. It tended to be more that there was a changing of the guard and they didn't really know where everything was.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
There are nonprofit groups and journalists that are working to preserve this information. There were already groups before Trump took office, like the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, that we saw a little of this in Trump's last term.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
And so there was this effort preemptively to preserve information, which includes not just Web pages, but also just collections of data from groups like the CDC. So there are all of these, not necessarily fragmented, but individual and private efforts.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
And also one of the really big load-bearing institutions here is the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, which has always maintained this project that archived data at the end of every term, but now has become a place where you can go and check and see what's disappeared and has become part of this process of identifying and trying to recover data.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
Link rot or digital decay, right? which is a general phenomenon where web pages either disappear or they move in a way that makes them more difficult to find.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
And so the Internet, which is a series of links that point to information, ends up with all of these little dangling ends and dead links and places where you can no longer find information that someone has referred to or when you can simply no longer find a record of it at all.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
The most obvious case is when a page is just taken down, maybe sometimes because the entire website went under, maybe sometimes because they think that page is no longer valuable.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
There are also incidents where just the URL of it, the link that points to that information changes, and so it's harder to find. So if you previously linked to it from another web page, then that's just not going to go there anymore.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
Link rot has been an issue that people have been identifying in some ways since really the beginning of the internet. But for definitely at least a decade, a really significant proportion of web pages and links have no longer functioned. I think the latest research was something like 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 are no longer available.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
This is, I think, not necessarily an issue that has suddenly snowballed, but I think we're seeing some unique circumstances now that have added to it. One of them is something like search engine optimization, where Google rewards pages, or at least people think it rewards pages, that regularly refresh or that... seem like they are providing new information.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
And so, for instance, CNET, which is a really venerable tech publication, removed a bunch of its older articles because it wanted to appear in Google search results more highly. And so there was this sense that, okay, it makes people more likely to find current articles, but also just this trove of information disappears.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
Sometimes it's a billionaire that buys something and shuts it down. There are also just more insidious phenomena that I think really kind of speak to the commercialization of the internet and the sort of cannibalization of anything that can be turned toward profit.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
So you have old websites that, say, have a name people recognize, and then they get resurrected, but they no longer have the old information. They've been filled with AI-generated new articles that can sort of capitalize on this old name as this zombie site.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
Or you have issues where there's a link that goes dead and somebody tries to kind of hijack that link and either they contact the website administrator or they find some other way to get that to point to a new page that will then build their own credibility but doesn't provide the original information. So there are all these cases where archival gives way to profit.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
That information was useful sometimes because it provided, say, statistics or it provided evidence. If you're, say, looking at Wikipedia and there's a dead link that no longer provides the information it used to. And sometimes just because these things are a valuable record. of what the internet used to be and of how people lived.
Today, Explained
Breaking the internet
There are a lot of things that at one point would have been written down on paper or in some other medium that's just a hard document and people can look back on it. But at this point, a huge amount of our culture takes place on the internet and the internet is a very fragile place.