The Trump administration’s effort to purge government websites is accelerating digital decay. It’s a trend that imperils our record of ourselves. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A photo illustration of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) website. Photo Illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
President Donald Trump has been back in office for one month. And what a year it's been. We've covered a lot of Trump that Today explained this past month, from pardons to executive orders to Greenland to Guantanamo to tariffs to Maha to Elon and Elon and even more Elon. But today we're going to talk about the websites.
DEIs would have ruined our country and now it's dead. I think the AI is dead. So if they want to scrub the website, that's OK with me.
Government web pages are disappearing. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they don't. And it's part of a greater problem we have online. Some call it digital decay. Others call it link rot. Whatever you call it, our Internet is disappearing. And we're going to help you understand why it matters and what we can do about it on the show today.
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Sean Ramos from here with Addie Robertson, senior editor at The Verge, here to tell us about the websites. What is going on with the government's websites?
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.
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Chapter 2: Why are government websites disappearing?
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.
Government agencies remove documents and companies fail and with them the sites they host. Think of GeoCities, Yahoo Video, and more recently, the news site Gawker.
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.
The wonder of it is it's very, very simple. Anybody could go and set up a web server on their computer and make it available to the world. Unfortunately, it's too simple. It's fragile. That if something happens to that piece of equipment, that website, just blink, is gone.
So you've been covering this issue, Addy, for more than 10 years. Is link rot getting worse online, or is it sort of continuing apace?
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.
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.
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.
Right. I mean, I think we can all, you know, mourn the loss of like our GeoCities homepage from 2003. Yahoo! But it's a lot rougher when like, I don't know, some billionaire buys out alternative newspaper and just decides one day to shut down its website.
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