Tech firms and governments can't be trusted to preserve digital history, which adds importance to the role of archives like the Egyptian 858 and Syrian Archive
We create almost everything on the internet, but we control almost none of it. — Recently, a 7-year-old photo of mine appeared at the top of my Facebook feed. Tweets: @tomgara , @davewiner , @digiphile , @dangillmor , and @neerajka Tweets: Tom Gara / @tomgara : “A tweet that was meant to be forgotten within minutes resurfaces years later to cost someone their job, while a video providing unambiguous evidence of war crimes disappears without a trace.” https://www.buzzfeed.com/... Scripting Com / @davewiner : It's much worse than buzzfeed reports. There's no permanence to the web. This is beyond Silicon Valley's ability to prevent or make worse. The naming system of the net is by design temporary. http://twitter.com/... Alex Howard / @digiphile : “Smartphones and social media have created an archive of publicly available information unlike any in human history — an ocean of eyewitness testimony. But while we create almost everything on the Internet, we control almost none of it."- @evanchill http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : To help understand why it's essential to re-decentralize the Internet, consider this: “We create almost everything on the internet, but we control almost none of it.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/... /by @evanchill Neeraj K. Agrawal / @neerajka : “Information ephemerality, and our lack of a model for non-corporate control of digital information, has been a blessing for governments looking to rewrite history” http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc in a running argument about who keeps the web's memory. As far back as 2015, Google was leaving archival projects in limbo and the Internet Archive stepped in to preserve what it abandoned — an early sign that commercial priorities and historical record-keeping don't align. By early 2018, archivists were exploring blockchain-based tamper-proof archives specifically because governments and billionaires with agendas could meddle with conventional collections.
The BuzzFeed framing — we create everything online but control none of it — matters most for war-crimes documentation: later reporting showed how social networks' proactive content removals are actively destroying evidence that investigators and NGOs need, which is exactly the gap outfits like Syrian Archive exist to fill.
First-order effects
- Platforms like Facebook hold deletion power over the primary record of events like the Arab Spring, so every takedown or feed redesign silently rewrites history while groups such as Syrian Archive race to copy at-risk material before it vanishes.
Second-order effects
- Independent archives become critical infrastructure, pulling funding and legitimacy away from platform-run 'memories' — pushing projects toward tamper-proof designs like the blockchain archival work and author-side fixes like Perma for rotting scholarly links.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, preservation of the public record structurally migrates from the companies that host content to third-party archives, eventually forcing legal questions about platforms' obligations to preserve evidentiary material rather than purge it.
The trend: The web's historical record is migrating from the platforms that host it to independent, tamper-resistant archives built precisely because those platforms cannot be trusted as custodians.