Breaking the internet
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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.
We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit based.
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.
The CDC is currently scrubbing information from their website right now to be in compliance with a recent executive order. Here are some of the pages that have gone down. The Trump administration has taken away reproductiverights.gov from the federal website. They also have scrubbed federal websites for any search of abortion. Within hours of President Trump's inauguration, the Spanish version of the official White House website disappeared. The website now gives users an error 404 message. A lot of the stuff initially happened very quietly.
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. 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.
Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.
Is there presidential precedent for something like this happening? Or is Donald Trump and Doge and Elon Musk and the gang like the first administration to come in and just start ripping apart websites?
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