Shortly after the arrival of the new administration, things began to be lost from the White House site.
It was not just party policy platforms that usually disappear during the presidential transition. Media pages about the constitution and former presidents, in various forms since President George W. Bush was in office, all of them disappeared.
Thousands of other government web pages have been canceled or modified, including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low -income children, opioid addiction and old warriors, before that. Court Problem prohibited part of the erasing of the sweeping. A The Ministry of Justice database Forensic charges and consequences associated with January 6, 2021 followed, the attack on the Capitol has been removed. Data sets slides goldSome experts who produced them were rejected, and he mentioned many words such as “black”, “women” and “discrimination”.
Al -Mahfuhon and the historians said that President Trump’s team is stripping the general registry selectively, and rebuilding its favorite vision of America in the negative space of antiseptic history. Since data and resources are deleted or changed, something essential is also in danger: Americans’ ability to reach their past and evaluate them, however, their already disgraceful confidence in the facts.
“This is not a mechanism to reduce costs,” said Kenny Evans, who is studying the science and technology policy at the Baker Public Policy Institute at Rice University and runs the archives of White House scientists at the school. “This slide towards confidentiality and a lack of transparency is the erosion of democratic standards.”
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said on X that the disposal was a standard practice of Copy ancient courtesy of the leaves Which was largely supported by the classified computer systems. In an e -mail statement, she did not address concerns about the removed records, but said that the president was communicating regularly with news and directly with the public and was “leading the most transparent administration in history.”
She said: “It adds transparency by exposing the vast waste, fraud, abuse across the federal government, and recovering accountability for taxpayers.”
The deletion campaign is more than enlarges the priorities of the management policy-it bury evidence of alternatives in the brand memory hole. Many information experts said that Mr. Trump’s executive orders have authoritarian tones, reminding us of when Russia Wikipedia cloningEncyclopedia on the Internet, stripping them of non -exciting materials. Information experts and Civil rights groups Fear that the historical vacuum can put responsibility for danger and the multiplication of confidence, especially in a political environment already hostile to researchers trying to fight misleading information.
“There are tectonic paintings that transform, a new version of the truth that is being filmed, and this, I think, is the most deep danger that we faced as a country,” said Lawrence E, a constitutional scientist and professor of Fakhiri at Harvard Law Faculty.
Even the governor of Utah Republican state called Mr. Trump to “Establish our historyAfter removing the first American woman to vote law from the Arlington National Center, along with to divide On other prominent women (Her profile Available again, but the Women’s History Department is not.) Signals to the sexual transformer of the National Park Service website for Stonewall National Monument.
Mr. Trump is unknown as lovers of preserving documents: former employees described it tendency to Documenting documents and Flowing papers under the toilet.
But his administration has emerged some government data. In March, the national archives issued about 64,000 documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including accounting records that included social security numbers for dozens of government workers from the late 1970s, and some still live.
He tried to restructure efforts by Elon Musk through the Ministry of Governmental Efficiency, which was arrested in a series of prominent errors, and tried to delete or block errors before the reversal of the last month and add more details that the facts of the facts can use to confirm their claims about the savings made by federal cancellation.
However, the historical record remains under severe pressure and not only from the government.
Mr. Musk has a revenge against Wikipedia, which the billionaire mocked the name “Wokedia” last year. He described the encyclopedia, which was written and edited by volunteers from the general public, describing “an extension of ancient media propaganda” after describing the entry of a gesture that he made during the inauguration of Mr. Trump as “compared to the Nazi greeting.” Jimmy WalesThe Wikipedia founder retreated to the x social media platform, saying, “This is a fact. Every element is.”
The Data Corporation, a research tank, said, In a report Last month, it changes in the collection of federal evidence They coincide with similar transformations in the private data sector. These include more than 2000 workers’ demobilization and other departure in March and many analysis companies that are completely closed. A year ago, Google also The links were removed to the stored pages Of the search results, stripping a feature for a long time helped researchers and others to change changes on web sites.
Samuel and Walli, head of misinformation at the University of Pittsburg, said that resources from the government have become of particular importance as the researchers find themselves limited or cut off from the data reserves kept by social media companies.
He said: “The idea that we no longer need supervision or access to information that allows us to suddenly supervise the matter of anxiety.” “Getting rid of public records and people who study things like influence operations that amount to a kind of oversight.”
Outside the government, many provinces are now rushing to maintain endangered materials.
The data rescue project, which was launched in February, is an index Conservation efforts and Reserve Government data groups. Since 2008, and End of the web archive It made a “comprehensive harvest” from the fields of federal government and changes from the administration to the administration. Initiatives such as the Environmental Data Initiative, Governance and Open Environmental Data Project store copies of government climate data.
Another major participant: Internet archive, a 28 -year -old non -profit library located in the former luxurious Christian science church in San Francisco. About 140 workers, most of whom are engineers, are lamented by more than a billion URLs per day with the help of partners such as Cloudflare, WordPress, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia. The work is funded by donations and web archiving agreements with more than 1,300 schools, museums and libraries.
Archive collection more than 700,000 TB of archived web pages as one of the partners working on End of the term projectSpecify more than 150,000 government pages that have not been done without internet connection since the opening.
“What we see this time is unprecedented, both in terms of web -based resources that are transported on the Internet, and the materials on those pages that are changed,” said Mark Graham, director of the feeding machine, a digital warehouse that works on the Internet archive.
The archive has faced difficulties in recent years, such as copyright lawsuits from the signs of registrations and books publishers seeking to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars as compensation (the organization was a budget of $ 28 million in 2023). It was too It targets electronic attacks.
However, the Trump administration was not an obstacle. Mr. Musk called the archive.amazingAnd “and”The general good that must be present“Even when he complained about” ton of passive content “that is related to it.
In February, government lawyers have argued that the removal of information from the CDC website caused limited damage because it is still possible to display the pages that were cleaned on a Wayback machine. The federal judge opposed, noting that the site does not pick up every page, and does not appear that is archived on search engines and can only be found using their original URL.
He worked seven days a week with little rest since Mr. Trump took office.
He said: “We have seen examples throughout history and all over the world where governments are trying to change culture and change the values of the population by changing and/or restricting access to information.” “I think we still see that to this day“