Shortly after the arrival of the new administration, things began to miss the White House website.
It was not only the policy platforms that usually disappear during a presidential transition. The information pages on the Constitution and the previous presidents, in various forms since President George Bush was in power, all disappeared.
Thousands of other government websites had also been abolished or amended, including content on vaccines, hate crimes, low -income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before the court’s temporary mandate to temporarily prevent a part of the sweeping deletion. A database of the Ministry of Justice that monitors criminal charges and convictions linked to January 6, 2021, the attack on the Capitol has been removed. Data sets have disappeared, some of the experts who have produced them have been rejected and have evaporated many reports such as “black”, “women” and “discrimination”.
President Trump’s team selectively removes the public archive, rebuilding its preferred vision of America in the negative space of cleaned history, archives and historians. As data and resources are erased or changed, something fundamental is also at risk: the ability of Americans to access and evaluate their past and with it, their already unstable trust in events.
“This is not a cost cut mechanism,” said Kenny Evans, who studies the Policy of Science and Technology at the Rice University Public Policy Institute and manages the White House scientists at school. “This transparency towards secrecy and lack of transparency is a erosion of democratic rules.”
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesman, told X that the disposal process was a common practice for the old copies of bureaucratic projects that were largely supported by classified computer systems. In an email statement, he did not deal with concerns about the files that have been removed, but said the president was regularly communicating with news agencies and directly with the public and “led the most transparent administration in history”.
“He adds transparency, exposing huge waste, fraud and abuse throughout the federal government and the rehabilitation of accountability to taxpayers,” he said.
The deletion campaign does not enhance the priorities of the administration policy-destroys the indications for alternatives in a Maga memory hole. Several information experts said that Mr Trump’s executive commands have authoritarian deformities, reminiscent of Russia cloned Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and stripped it with unstable material. Information experts and political rights are afraid that a historical gap could endanger accountability and mistrust in the race, especially in an already hostile political environment for researchers trying to combat misinformation.
“There are tectonic plates that are shifting and it is a new version of the truth depicted and that I think is the deepest danger we have ever encountered as a country,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar and professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School.
Even the Republican Lieutenant of Utah called on Mr Trump to “restore our story” after the first American woman was removed from the website of the Arlington National Cemetery, along with a section for other notable women (her profile is available again). References to transsexual people disappeared from the website of the National Park service for the Stonewall National Monument.
Mr Trump is not known as the enthusiasm of the maintenance of documents: Past officials described his tendency to extract documents and the documents that flush the toilet.
But his administration has appeared some government elements. In March, national archives published about 64,000 documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including accounting files containing the social security numbers of dozens of government workers since the late 1970s, some of them still live.
The restructuring effort led by Elon Musk through the efficiency of the Ministry of Government, which had been caught in a series of high profile errors, attempted to delete or hide the errors before the lesson was reversed last month and adding more details that could be used by Federal grants.
The historical archive, however, remains under strong pressure and not just by the government.
Mr Musk has a Vendetta against Wikipedia, which the billionaire violated “Wokepedia” last year. Called Encyclopedia, which is written and processed by volunteers from the general public, “Expansion of Legacy Media propaganda” after an entry described a gesture that had recently launched Trump as “compared to a Nazi greeting”. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, pushed back to the social media platform, saying “this is the fact.
The Data Foundation, a Think Tank, stated in a report last month that it is changing in the federal gathering of evidence coincide with similar displacements in the private sector of data. These include more than 2,000 redundancies and other departures in March and several analysis companies that are entirely closed. A year ago, Google also removed links to stored pages from search results, removing a long -term feature that helped researchers and others to monitor sites.
Government resources have become particularly important, as researchers are limited or cut off from data reserves maintained by social media companies, said Samuel Woolley, president of misinformation studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
“The idea that suddenly we no longer need supervision or access to information that allows us to carry out supervision is alarming,” he said. “Public archives and people studying things like influence businesses are equivalent to a kind of censorship with omission.”
In addition to the government, many archives are now rushing to maintain the threatened material.
The data rescue project, launched in February, records maintenance efforts and supports government data sets. Since 2008, the end of the web archive has carried out a “comprehensive harvest” of the federal government sectors and has recorded changes from administration to administration. Initiatives such as the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and the project of open environmental data store copies of government climate data.
Another key participant: The Internet Archive, a 28 -year -old non -profit library was housed in a Church of Christian Science in San Francisco. About 140 workers, mainly engineers, archive more than one billion URLs a day with assistance from partners such as the parent organization Cloudflare, WordPress, Reddit and Wikipedia, Wikimedia. The project is funded by web archiving and agreements with more than 1,300 schools, museums and libraries.
The archive has collected over 700,000 terabytes of archived websites as one of the partners working at the end of the project, identifying more than 150,000 government pages that have surpassed the inauguration.
“What we see this time is unprecedented, both in terms of the field and the scale of internet -based resources, which are taken offline and material on those changing pages,” said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback machine, a digital repository operating through the Internet.
The archive has faced difficulties in recent years, such as copyright lawsuits by record companies and publishers seeking losses of hundreds of millions of dollars (the organization had a budget of $ 28 million in 2023). He has also targeted by the cyber -bishops.
Trump’s administration, however, was not an obstacle. Mr Musk called the archive “Awesome” and “a public good that must exist”, even when he complained of a “tone of negative” content that concerned him.
In February, government lawyers claimed that the removal of information from the CDC website caused limited damage because the pages cleared could be displayed on the Wayback machine. A federal judge disagreed, noting that the site does not record any page and those archived do not appear on search engines and can only be found using their original URL.
Mr Graham, a veteran of the Air Force who can ring from the URL from memory, said he had worked seven days a week with a few breaks since Mr Trump assumed duties.
“We have seen examples throughout history and around the world where governments are trying to change culture, change the values of a population by changing and/or restricting access to information,” he said. “I think we see it to date. ”
