By Kasia Murphy
It was recently uncovered in ComputerWeekly that the Tory party had deleted ten years worth of speeches and press releases from its website. However, it doesn’t stop there – the materials were not just erased from the Conservatives' website and YouTube page, but from the INTERNET ARCHIVE – the world's digital library.
So what terrible, dark and awful materials were deleted? The ‘disappeared’ materials were pre-General election speeches and press releases that discussed how the new Tories were all about modernising conservatism, dedicated to saving the environment and that “cuts would be made to the deficit, not the NHS”, and so on.
Unsurprisingly, censoring the internet isn’t quite like setting a load of books on fire a lá the 15th century, rather this move was done by altering the Robots.txt file on their Conservatives.com site which instructs web crawlers such as Google about what content it is allowed to access.
However, there are many sophisticated archiving tools and methods out there – thanks in no small part to, you guessed it, technology! For one, the British Library has been archiving a selection of the UK's Web since the mid-2000s.
Fortunately human(electorate)-memory is pretty hard to purge, and there are still plenty of one-liners that can be sourced from articles published in the period between 2000 – May 2010, like this chestnut:
"It's clear to me that political leaders will have to learn to let go... Let go of the information that we've guarded so jealously." David Cameron, 11 October 2007, Google Zeitgeist Conference in San Francisco.
Also worrying is that Labour's current news archive dates back only as far as the start of Ed Miliband's leadership, in 2010 – and it is supposed to be regularly ‘updated’! Even speeches delivered by Tony Blair during his time as prime minister appear to have been deleted. That said, Labour did not use the Robots.txt file meaning it’s all still out there, somewhere.
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