Brownstone Institute
Uncovering the Army of Federal Censors
I’ve recently posted twice on the case of Missouri v. Biden, in which the states of Missouri and Louisiana — along with four private plaintiffs (Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, the non-profit Health Freedom Louisiana, and yours truly) represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance — are suing the Biden Administration for alleged free speech violations. Specifically, the executive branch of the federal government has been colluding with social media to censor any content on social media platforms — Twitter, YouTube (owned by Google), and LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft), Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta) — any content that questions, challenges, or contradicts the government’s covid policies.
While private companies might arguably choose to censor content on their platforms, the government cannot pressure or coerce private companies to censor disfavored content. Any such action is clearly a violation of the free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. As we articulate in our latest legal brief: “Under the First Amendment, the federal Government should have no role in policing private speech or picking winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. But that is what federal officials are doing, on a massive scale.”
Our joint statement on discovery disputes legal brief, filed with the court and made public today, reveals scores of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful. Here are just a few excerpts from this document, which includes attachments of hundreds of pages of emails and other governmental and Big Tech internal communications as supporting evidence. These documents were obtained after we requested the following information on discovery:
Plaintiffs served interrogatories and document requests upon the Government Defendants seeking the identity of federal officials who have been and are communicating with social-media platforms about disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and/or any censorship or suppression of speech on social media, including the nature and content of those communications. Plaintiffs also served third-party subpoenas on five major social-media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta), YouTube, and LinkedIn. On August 17, 2022, the Government Defendants provided objections and responses to the Plaintiff States’ discovery requests, and began a rolling production of documents that was completed on August 26, 2022.
Here’s some of we found so far in the documents that have been turned over, as described in our latest legal filing to the court:
Secretary Mayorkas of DHS [Department of Homeland Security] commented that the federal Government’s efforts to police private speech on social media are occurring “across the federal enterprise.” Doc. 45, ¶ 233. It turns out that this statement is true, on a scale beyond what Plaintiffs could ever have anticipated. The limited discovery produced so far provides a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social media—all with the intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavor.
The discovery provided so far demonstrates that this Censorship Enterprise is extremely broad, including officials in the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General; and evidently other agencies as well, such as the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the US Election Assistance Commission. And it rises to the highest levels of the US Government, including numerous White House officials. More discovery is needed to uncover the full scope of this “Censorship Enterprise,” and thus allow Plaintiffs the opportunity to achieve fully effective injunctive relief. Defendants have objected to producing some of the most relevant and probative information in their possession—i.e., the identities, and nature and content of communications, of White House officials and officials at other federal agencies who are not yet Defendants in this case because they were unknown when Plaintiffs served their discovery six weeks ago. Defendants have objected to producing discovery that would reveal both the height and the breadth of the federal “Censorship Enterprise.” The Court should overrule these objections and order Defendants to provide this highly relevant, responsive, and probative information.
Our brief continues:
First, the breadth and extent of the federal Defendants’ censorship activities is massive. In their initial response to interrogatories, Defendants initially identified forty-five federal officials at DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General (all within only two federal agencies, DHS and HHS), who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation and censorship. Ex. 1 (Defendants’ Redacted Interrogatory Responses), at 15-18.
[…]
The third-party social-media platforms, moreover, have revealed that more federal agencies are involved. Meta, for example, has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials—including senior officials at the FDA, the US Election Assistance Commission, and the White House—have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms, many of whom were not disclosed in response to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories to Defendants. YouTube disclosed eleven federal officials engaged in such communications, including officials at the Census Bureau and the White House, many of whom were also not disclosed by Defendants. Twitter disclosed nine federal officials, including senior officials at the State Department who were not previously disclosed by Defendants.
As I will write about more in a future post, the government is protecting Anthony Fauci and other high level officials by refusing to reveal documents related to their involvement. Stay tuned for more on that issue. For now, as our brief explains here, those implicated include many officials at the highest level of the current administration:
Second, these federal censorship activities include very senior officials within the US Government, i.e., “members of our senior staff,” in former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s words. Doc. 42, ¶ 174. Defendants have steadfastly refused to respond to any interrogatories or document requests directed to the White House officials, such as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Dr. Fauci in his capacity as Chief Medical Advisor to the President. But their own document production provides a glimpse into the involvement of several senior White House officials in communications with social-media platforms about censorship – including White House Senior Covid-19 Advisor Andrew Slavitt, Deputy Assistant to the President Rob Flaherty, White House Covid-19 Director of Strategic Communications and Engagement Courtney Rowe, White House Digital Director for the Covid-19 Response Team Clarke Humphrey, among others. See Ex. 3.
Further, the social-media platforms have independently disclosed the identities of senior White House officials involved in such communications. For example, Meta has disclosed the involvement of additional White House officials as White House Counsel Dana Remus and White House Partnerships Manager Aisha Shah, as well as Deputy Assistant to the President Rob Flaherty. YouTube has disclosed the involvement of White House officials such as Rob Flaherty and Benjamin Wakana, the Director of Strategic Communications and Engagement at the White House COVID-19 Response Team. Twitter has disclosed the involvement of Andrew Slavitt.
Our lawyers then cite a few examples of how this government censorship regime has been functioning, as revealed by internal communications:
The limited communications produced so far from these high-level officials are particularly relevant and probative, because they provide revealing glimpses into the intensive oversight and pressure to censor that senior federal officials placed on social-media platforms. For example, after President Biden publicly stated (about Facebook) on July 16, 2021, that “They’re killing people,” a very senior executive at Meta (Facebook and Instagram) reached out to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to engage in damage control and appease the President’s wrath. Ex. 4, at 1. Soon thereafter, the same Meta executive sent a text message to Surgeon General Murthy, noting that “it’s not great to be accused of killing people,” and expressing that he was “keen to find a way to deescalate and work together collaboratively.” Ex. 5, at 1.
Such “deescalation” and “working together collaboratively,” naturally, involved increasing censorship on Meta’s platforms. One week after President Biden’s public accusation, on July 23, 2021, that a senior Meta executive sent an email to Surgeon General Murthy stating, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken to further address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to the disinfo dozen….” Ex. 3, at 2. Again, on August 20, 2021, the same Meta executive emailed Murthy to assure him that Facebook “will shortly be expanding our COVID policies to further reduce the spread of potentially harmful content on our platform. These changes will apply across Facebook and Instagram,” and they included “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content,” and “making it easier to have Pages/Groups/Accounts demoted for sharing COVID and vaccine-related misinformation.” Ex. 4, at 3. In addition, that senior Meta executive sent a “Facebook bi-weekly covid content report” to Surgeon General Murthy to White House official Andrew Slavitt, evidently to reassure these federal officials that Facebook’s suppression of COVID-19 “misinformation” was aggressive enough for their preferences. Ex. 4, at 6-19.
The brief then goes on to explain how this amounts to more than just collaboration or cooperation between government and Big Tech, but coercive use of power dynamics to pressure Big Tech to do the government’s bidding:
Such communications from the White House impose maximal pressure on social-media companies, and they clearly get results when it comes to censorship. And federal officials are fully aware that such pressure is necessary to induce social-media platforms to increase censorship. CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] Director Jen Easterly, for example, texted with another CISA official about “trying to get us in a place where Fed can work with platforms to better understand the mis/dis trends so relevant agencies can try to prebunk/debunk as useful,” and complained about the Government’s need to overcome the social-media platforms’ “hesitation” to working with the government: “Platforms have got to get more comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” Ex. 5, at 4 (emphasis added).
Perhaps these companies were hesitant because they knew that the government pressure and coercion was clearly unlawful, not to mention the fact that private companies and publishers don’t want to be told what to publish and don’t want their policies dictated by government officials. Our legal brief goes on:
In fact, such pressures from government officials on social-media companies, along with the many public statements alleged in the Complaint, have succeeded on a grand scale. Discovery received so far indicates that a veritable army of federal bureaucrats are involved in censorship activities “across the federal enterprise.” They include the 45 key custodians identified in Plaintiffs’ interrogatory responses so far, 32 federal officials identified by Facebook so far, eleven officials identified by YouTube, and nine identified by Twitter (many of which do not overlap, either with each other or Defendants’ disclosures). And Defendants have not yet received interrogatory responses reflecting Defendants’ knowledge of federal officials at other agencies who communicate with social-media platforms about censorship — but apparently there are many. So many, in fact, that CISA Director Jen Easterly and another CISA official apparently complained, in an internal text messages, that “chaos” would result if all federal officials were “independently” contacting social-media platforms about so-called misinformation: “Not our mission but was looking to play a coord role so not every D/A is independently reaching out to platforms which could cause a lot of chaos.” Ex. 5, at 4.
These federal bureaucrats are deeply embedded in a joint enterprise with social-media companies to procure the censorship of social-media speech. Officials at HHS routinely flag content for censorship, for example, by organizing weekly “Be On The Lookout” meetings to flag disfavored content, Ex. 6; sending lengthy lists of examples of disfavored posts to be censored, Ex. 6, at 21-22; serving as privileged “fact checkers” whom social-media platforms consult about censoring private speech, Ex. 7; and receiving detailed reports from social-media companies about so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation” activities online, Ex. 4; among others. CISA, likewise, has aggressively embraced its “evolved mission” of screening complaints of social-media disinformation and then “routing disinformation concerns” to social-media platforms, Doc. 45, ¶¶ 250-251. CISA routinely receives reports of perceived “disinformation” and forwards them to social-media companies, placing the considerable weight of its authority as a federal national-security agency behind other parties’ demands for suppression of private speech. Ex. 8.
Moreover, many of these substantive communications from federal officials flagging specific posts and content for censorship seem to occur through alternative channels of communication that Plaintiffs have not yet obtained (as the third-party social-media platforms contend they are shielded from discovery by the Stored Communications Act). For example, Facebook trained CDC and Census Bureau officials on how to use a “Facebook misinfo reporting channel.” Ex. 9. Twitter offered federal officials a privileged channel for flagging misinformation through a “Partner Support Portal.” Ex. 9, at 69. YouTube has disclosed that it granted “trusted flagger” status to Census Bureau officials, which allows privileged and expedited consideration of their claims that content should be censored.
In the face of these and many other disclosures, Defendants are refusing to provide some of the most relevant and most probative evidence of the most egregious First Amendment violations.
Our legal team will continue to press for full disclosure of the requested content that the government still refuses to hand over to the court. And yes, we brought the receipts for all these allegations — the entire document is available here, and the supporting evidence is included on pages 142 – 711 for those who want to dig into the gruesome details. For those who want the shorter version, the NCLA press release is available here.
I suspected all this was happening but didn’t imagine the sheer scope — the breadth, depth, and coordination — suggested by the evidence that our legal team has uncovered so far during the discovery phase of the legal proceedings. To see this evidence on the page, which we know is just the tip of the iceberg, is simply shocking — and I’m not an easy person to shock. Likewise, the deep involvement of many of our national security agencies is revealing and disturbing, even for this author who just wrote a book with the subtitle, “The Rise of the Biomedical Security State.”
Hyperbole and exaggeration have been common features on both sides of covid policy disputes. But I can say with all soberness and circumspection (and you, kind readers, will correct me if I am wrong here): this evidence suggests we are uncovering the most serious, coordinated, and large-scale violation of First Amendment free speech rights by the federal government’s executive branch in US history. Period, full stop. Even wartime propaganda efforts never reached this level of censorship, nor did the government in days past have the power of today’s social media at its disposal.
Stay tuned for more updates as this case unfolds.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.
No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.
Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.
It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.
Features of the CDC’s edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous “six feet of distance” and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.
Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel.
The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.
It was called “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.”
By absence of empirical data, the meaning is: nothing like this has ever been tried. The point of the document was to map out how it could be possible and alert authorities to possible pitfalls to be avoided.
“This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings. This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data. Considerations are based on current evidence known about the transmission and severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and may need to be revised as more information becomes available.”
The meaning of “shielding” is “to reduce the number of severe Covid-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (‘high-risk’) and the general population (‘low-risk’). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector, or community level depending on the context and setting. They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.”
In other words, this is what used to be concentration camps.
Who are these people who would be rounded up? They are “older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions.” Who determines this? Public health authorities. The purpose? The CDC explains: “physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population” allows authorities “to prioritize the use of the limited available resources.”
This sounds a lot like condemning people to death in the name of protecting them.
The model establishes three levels. First is the household level. Here high-risk people are“physically isolated from other household members.” That alone is objectionable. Elders need people to take care of them. They need love and to be surrounded by family. The CDC should never imagine that it would intervene in households to force old people into separate places.
The model jumps from households to the “neighborhood level.” Here we have the same approach: forced separation of those deemed vulnerable.
From there, the model jumps again to the “camp/sector level.” Here it is different. “A group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector (max 50 high-risk individuals per single green zone) where high-risk individuals are physically isolated together. One entry point is used for exchange of food, supplies, etc. A meeting area is used for residents and visitors to interact while practicing physical distancing (2 meters). No movement into or outside the green zone.”
Yes, you read that correctly. The CDC is here proposing concentration camps for the sick or anyone they deem to be in danger of medically significant consequences of infection.
Further: “to minimize external contact, each green zone should include able-bodied high-risk individuals capable of caring for residents who have disabilities or are less mobile. Otherwise, designate low-risk individuals for these tasks, preferably who have recovered from confirmed COVID-19 and are assumed to be immune.”
The plan says in passing, contradicting thousands of years of experience, “Currently, we do not know if prior infection confers immunity.” Therefore the only solution is to minimize all exposure throughout the whole population. Getting sick is criminalized.
These camps require a “dedicated staff” to “monitor each green zone. Monitoring includes both adherence to protocols and potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma. It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”
The people housed in these camps need to have good explanations of why they are denied even basic religious freedom. The report explains:
“Proactive planning ahead of time, including strong community engagement and risk communication is needed to better understand the issues and concerns of restricting individuals from participating in communal practices because they are being shielded. Failure to do so could lead to both interpersonal and communal violence.”
Further, there must be some mechanisms to prohibit suicide:
Additional stress and worry are common during any epidemic and may be more pronounced with COVID-19 due to the novelty of the disease and increased fear of infection, increased childcare responsibilities due to school closures, and loss of livelihoods. Thus, in addition to the risk of stigmatization and feeling of isolation, this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind. Shielded individuals with concurrent severe mental health conditions should not be left alone. There must be a caregiver allocated to them to prevent further protection risks such as neglect and abuse.
The biggest risk, the document explains, is as follows: “While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings.”
(It should go without saying but this “shielding” approach suggested here has nothing to do with focused protection of the Great Barrington Declaration. Focused protection specifically says: “schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”)
In four years of research, and encountering truly shocking documents and evidence of what happened in the Covid years, this one certainly ranks up at the top of the list of totalitarian schemes for pathogenic control prior to vaccination. It is quite simply mind-blowing that such a scheme could ever be contemplated.
Who wrote it? What kind of deep institutional pathology exists that enabled this to be contemplated? The CDC has 10,600 full-time employees and contractors and a budget of $11.5 billion. In light of this report, and everything else that has gone on there for four years, both numbers should be zero.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
Authors
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