![]() ![]() Web pages don’t have to be deliberately deleted to disappear. Social media, public records, junk: in the end, everything goes. Last year, BuzzFeed deleted more than four thousand of its staff writers’ early posts, apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider. In 2006, David Cameron gave a speech in which he said that Google was democratizing the world, because “making more information available to more people” was providing “the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power.” Seven years later, Britain’s Conservative Party scrubbed from its Web site ten years’ worth of Tory speeches, including that one. Chances are, though, that it actually won’t. No one believes any longer, if anyone ever did, that “if it’s on the Web it must be true,” but a lot of people do believe that if it’s on the Web it will stay on the Web. It might seem, and it often feels, as though stuff on the Web lasts forever, for better and frequently for worse: the embarrassing photograph, the regretted blog (more usually regrettable not in the way the slaughter of civilians is regrettable but in the way that bad hair is regrettable). Strelkov’s “We just downed a plane” post lasted barely two hours. The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane. “Strelkov is the field commander in Slaviansk and one of the most important figures in the conflict,” Shmelev had written in an e-mail to the Internet Archive on July 1st, and his page “deserves to be recorded twice a day.” Strelkov’s VKontakte page was on Shmelev’s list. Shmelev is one of about a thousand librarians and archivists around the world who identify possible acquisitions for the Internet Archive’s subject collections, which are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. Two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive’s Ukraine Conflict collection. G.M.T., Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, or someone acting on his behalf, posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” (An Antonov 26 is a Soviet-built military cargo plane.) The post includes links to video of the wreckage of a plane it appears to be a Boeing 777. The plane’s last radio contact was at 1:20 P.M. All two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine. ![]() ![]() on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 A.M. The Web wasn’t built to preserve its past the Wayback Machine aims to remedy that. ![]()
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