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[Gothmog]

63. The Joy Reid Saga: The Wayback Machine cannot guarantee authenticity

The wayback machine does not guarantee anything https://burningbird.net/the-joy-reid-saga-the-wayback-machine-cannot-guarantee-authenticity/#.WuDw69w6PTy.twitter

The same cannot be said for the actual Wayback Machine archives.

The Wayback Machine is an invaluable historical record of the web. Through it, I’ve been able to recover past writings lost because of all the many changes I’ve made to my web site. It’s a wonderful way of exploring the web’s history.

However, the Wayback Machine is not, and never has been, a definitive source of the authenticity of what it captures on the web. It has access to a web page at a specific location at a specific time…but no special privilege that allows it to determine the authenticity of the author of the content in the page.

As noted by Chris Butler at the Internet Archives, home organization for the Wayback Machine:

When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.

Pages archived at different dates and by different entities... This statement is key to understanding the difference between Wayback Machine’s archival functionality as separate from the media’s assumption of Wayback Machine as Super Authenticator, able to leap tall metadata with a single bound!