Internet archive founder Brewster Kahle gave the Keynote at the “State of the Net” Conference on January 28, 2020.
In his speech, Kahle referenced Kathyrn Maher:
at the end of the evening Kathryn Maher the executive director from Wikipedia she said something that frightened me she said she was worried that truth might fracture
Maher’s said that Wikipedia is built on the idea of consensus, rather than alternative truths.
Consensus is achieved on Wikipedia through citation wars, which are won on the weight of citations. They bias towards things that you can click on and see. Unfortunately a lot of the free stuff (advertising supported) is not the best content available. Much of the best stuff available is not freely available on the net.
- Archive.org fixed 11 million broken links and prioritizes the cited
- Next priority is journal literature.
Much of this information isn’t available because of:
- Copyright problems
- Institutions not doing the right thing.
28:14
misinformation disinformation how can future researchers distinguish the good from the bad and the good from the nonsense and the evil context so how can you tell what you’re looking at whatever it’s crap or not it’s how we teach our kids it’s how we learn what’s we’re growing up it’s what’s the context of it sometimes that’s a little hard to tell because things get disembodied from where they came from but if you can then take something and find out where it did come from that helps a whole heck of a lot
Content moderation perspective about just what you want to be in there because what I’m hearing is kind of like
everything except for stuff that’s illegal is that really what it is or is there so content moderation can I jump in I’ve
cussed in moderation is usually an issue around some of these platforms that are putting things out more actively so the internet archives are record of them so let me speak on things that I’m not running these organizations that do that the Twitter’s and the Facebook’s and the like those guys are in a really tough bind okay I don’t like some of them right some of the technologies are kind of crap but they on they’re in a tough bind they’ve built systems that were really designed to maintain small communities and keeping them in touch with each other you know when is the soccer game what how do you go and do these things and based on their business models they invited in celebrities and news and then political larger scale distribution of of information I think that was a mistake it was a very advertising driven to be able to go and do these things they make a lot of money I mean these presidential campaigns alone are on the order of a billion dollars each that are going to be spent in the order of six months the corrupting influences of that much money is something that most people’s technologies cannot withstand a much you if we’re starting to record radio red state radio and also a blue state radio and it is wacky out there um and it is flooded with money to go and corrupt these systems so if you’re talking to just don’t nail the the Facebook’s and the like there’s a wider corruption of our of our media ecosystems so what do we do about it I’m going and asking these guys to just take down bad stuff is really hard for them to do and it doesn’t put them in the right positions in fact um so how I think we try to build some of these platforms so that they do have references so if they go and make it so that you’re just mouthing off you can tell and that’s easier to sort of know to ignore as a reader or as an editor on these platforms enable communities to go and do their own moderation as opposed to just saying oh Mark Zuckerberg you fix it um that’s not a prescription that’s gonna work very well we’ll run out of ways of doing that but I think we need also a bit more slack and investment in our digital infrastructure and ecosystem the level you know as I said the budgets on these things they’re tiny the things that maintain our underlying not the Facebook’s those guys have big budgets but the underlying Internet infrastructure is massively under invested in when there’s a question why is the Internet Archive an independent nonprofit why are we part of a university why are we part of a National Lab when I was growing up that’s where all this stuff was but they aren’t anymore why not as we’ve now started to
really depend on these systems the funding for them is not is not there so I think the idea of just whacking Apple on the side of the head and saying you fix it ain’t gonna it’s not gonna lead the results you imagined Oh their question was the question was what about content that it’s on the archive if there are illegal things on it then we take it down especially in the countries in which it’s illegal so if China had gone and said you can’t have those videos up because it breaks our laws we and we offered to just block it for those in
China they said no it has to be blocked for everybody we said that’s not what we do so they blocked us all right we are out of time but I really I’m gonna take my moderator Prague in for a minute and say this has been such an honor because not only is Internet Archive so amazing but Brewster is also a hero of mine and getting to watch what he’s built for the world and for all of us is just so amazing so Thank You Brewster thank you and thank you [Applause]