Mark Graham

This is an evolving landscape that we live in of people's perceptions and realities. With the advent of the AI companies and large amounts of material that they've gathered from the public web and then used in new and different ways, There has been changes by some of the folks who are making that material available. Many organizations are kind of closing down the hashes.

So far, we've been doing okay. We've actually been working cooperatively with many different platforms for a long time. And we also take measures to respect the intellectual property and the rights of content creators. The material from the Wayback Machine is... generally only available as a playback of an individual URL. We don't support the bulk downloading of the material.

In general terms, there are exceptions to that. There's a project we do, for example, with the Library of Congress and the National Archives, where we archive material from U.S. government websites. Making the material available within a specific controlled environment, we've been able to have good relationships with most folks out there.

For example, Reddit recently put out an announcement where they said, you know, we're locking things down, but we have an agreement with the Internet Archive. Reddit considers the work that they do with us to be a legitimate and beneficial, a beneficial service to the patrons of Reddit.

Well, we are a library. I'm not a lawyer. I don't have those kind of conversations. I get up every day and I ask myself the question, how can we do a better job archiving more of the public web in a way that is respectful, in a way that is useful, in a way that is helping to preserve the cultural heritage of our times? I guess...

We're doing fine. You know, so there's challenges every day. But honestly, that's not one of the ones that's keeping me up at night. No.

Some of it is, yeah. Actually, TikTok is one of those platforms that we're doing a fair amount of archiving on. So I would say yes. And in some of these cases, like say TikTok or Telegram or Rumble or let's say Truth Social or some of these other social platforms, we're not trying to get everything. That's far too much, but we are trying to get a fair amount.

In some cases, we're working with domain experts, subject matter experts, et cetera. We're hoping to guide us and to get things that may be cultural or historically more significant or others. You mentioned memes, for example. And so if you take a meme as a meme and as a vector into, okay, let's try to collect material related to this meme.

So there are any one of a number of methods that we might incorporate to try to help prioritize material that we would get from some of these platforms.

First of all, there's a lot of people that work here. More than 100 people work at the Internet Archive. We do a variety of different things from an engineering perspective or a program perspective. And yeah, there are choices that are made. But I would say we're mostly constrained by just our own creativity and our own imagination.

We have a fair amount of latitude as we work here to explore our interests as individuals and as an organization. But with a really strong focus on just trying to do a really good job of the things that we set out to do. And admittedly, the North Star, universal access to all knowledge, is a high bar. But we have the...

The luxury of being able to pursue that with a lot of resources is something that I have a great deal of gratitude for. And I know that the people that I work with do as well. And I think that millions of patrons that use our service every day also.

And we are respectful of rights holders. And one of the ways that we are respectful is that we do respond to requests to have things excluded from the Wayback Machine. So rights holders that make legitimate requests. We actually have human beings that check these things out. We just don't say, oh, so-and-so said, just take that out. But we do consider the request.

Sometimes if the person is a public official, then we will have to weigh off their request with maybe a broader public right to know. But we work those things out on a case-by-case basis.

We weigh off the evidence, the information that's available to us. That particular case, for example, would live in a category, I would say, where there are times when we learn about situations where there is what may be considered a high probability of real-world harm. and then have to make a decision.

The fact of the matter is there's material that is made available on the web that does cause real human suffering. And there are cases in which we have a duty to care. Another one maybe that is with child sexual exploitation material, for example. I don't think people are really questioning that too much, right? You say, oh, they took that down or something. Well, yeah, of course.

And first of all, that's the law. But there's other cases, doxing, for example, or harassment, or where people's personal safety or other risks have to be taken into consideration. So these are not decisions that are made lightly. We have policy that helps guide us, but very carefully and diligently. And we reconsider, too. That's another thing, too. It's not just like, oh, that was done.

And that's never to be looked at again. No. Over time, situations change, and the context of material in a new light of a new day may lead to different kinds of decisions.

If you create something and you want it to stick around for a while, then take care. If you see something, save something. The Internet Archive is a free resource. It's available to anyone with a browser and a connection to the Internet. Just go to web.archive.org. If you'd like to preserve a URL, put it into the Save Page Now feature on the bottom right. Write to us.

Write to us at info.archive.org. If you've got a website that you think may be at risk, send us a note, and we'll make sure that we do a really good job of preserving it.