De-indexing Unpopular Speech

Vito Tums
Vito Tums
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Today I found an unlabeled event in my calendar app. November 16, 2017. With some research, I was able to find out that this is the date of a story that was published by Heat Street’s Louise Mensch. Heat Street is a digital media syndication now owned by Market Watch. The story titled “Exclusive FBI Granted FISA warrant covering Trump Camps ties to Russia” is effectively gone from the internet thanks to Google and other forces. Never mind that this was the impetus behind the Trump Wiretap tweet that ignited a fire storm and the subsequent media tongue lashing of President Trump for the coming months. Only to be confirmed at a later date. In fact a copy of the warrant is the only vestage of Mensch’s story I could find with a google search. The good news is that I was able later to find a copy of the story on the Archive.org site but if you were to do a simple google search for the story. You would think that the actual story had fallen into a blackhole on the internet.

In the digital age, stories that shake up the entire media slash political system can now be removed and lost as a point of reference. By either de-indexing the content from google searchs or it can be lost. When the site is bought out by another company and that company decides to not host the content. These are the ways in which powerful players on the internet remove ideas from the Medium of discussion. I believe it would behoove us as individuals to cache more web documents that are from dissident points of view. Otherwise the record will be only from those powerful players who control the resources of the internet.

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