Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: Mementos from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine showing the deletion of the entire LGBTQ youth resources page on the Virginia Department of Health website between  2023-05-31 and  2023-06-01 In July 2023, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin received national press for deleting webpages on the Virginia Department of Health website containing LGBTQ+ youth resources. This isn't the first time the Youngkin administration has deleted webpages: within one week of his inauguration, he deleted the Virginia Mathematics Pathways Initiative website . The Washington Post article from July 2023 also discussed additional webpages that had content removed in 2022. Journalists discovered these webpage changes through emails between state employees, but the emails didn't contain the website addresses. Without linking to mementos at a web archive, readers of the articles can't see the changes for themselves. Not linking to archived webpages in news articles is consistent w...

Figure 1: The Wayback Machine "Changes" tool showing the difference between George Santos's biography on December 19, 2022 and February 3, 2023. Deletions are highlighted in yellow and additions are highlighted in blue. Source:  https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20221219173515/20230203162225/https://georgeforny.com/about/ The Washington Post recently published the article, " See the evolution of lies in George Santos's campaign biography ." George Santos is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 118th U.S. Congress. He has steadily removed claims from his website that have been proven to be false, such as holding a bachelor's degree from Baruch College. In the Washington Post article, the journalists used the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to find and view previous versions of his webpage that included the false claims. To show change over time, they interspersed colored text boxes with the change text throughout the article. Previo...