Ha...tories start deleting speeches and removing them from archives

MFW_ASAP

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

Mark my words, Graham. You are going to be famous.

Many years hence, probably around the year 2095, there is going to be a huge house price crash. In all the mayhem of apportioning blame, someone's going to trawl these archives, find your posts, and prove how right you were and the HTB scheme is going to be proven to have caused it. You will be famous.

Eat your heart out, Nostrodamus.

What is funny is that Graham and some others (!!!!!!? was notable for this) really do believe that their obscure internet ramblings are noteworthy and will be held in reverence by future historians.

I can't help but think that if Graham got a girlfriend, (lets see, had a bath, spray deodorant on, go out of his 2 bed house, speak to women about non-HPC related issues), then he'd vanish from this site and be much, much happier.

vivatifosi

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I think it's because they are getting them deleted from the web archive also, and stopping search engines from being able to find them.

It's not just their website they are updating. It's going a bit further than that.

This is the web archive which take copies of websites and preserves them... if they can get the speeches removed from here too theres no way any journalist could hold them up on something they have said. http://archive.org/web/

But what they have already said will already have been picked up by the Wayback Machine and going forward it will be archived by the British Library, so they won't get away with it. Once things are in the public domain, that's it. Plus, if someone thought they were hiding something, a Wikileaks type website duplicating stuff would appear before you could say abracadabra.

ging84

Graham_Devon wrote: »

It's one thing to revamp your website. But to destroy from web archives all previous speeches is another thing entirely.

This is the correct way to remove pages from a website
you give instructions to the web crawlers that the content has been intentionally removed rather than letting them just found out it's missing, they then decided what to do about it
the internet archive chooses to drop content that has been removed in this manner is not down to the torries
millions of websites are doing it every day

wotsthat

Graham_Devon wrote: »

This is the web archive which take copies of websites and preserves them... if they can get the speeches removed from here too theres no way any journalist could hold them up on something they have said. http://archive.org/web/

Google 'Gordon Brown boom and bust' - don't need the Labour website to demonstrate he said it. Try 'sluts UKIP' - same thing.

Have you heard of the internet, newspapers, television, radio - if you think journalists would struggle to find out what politicians said without party website you have a lower opinion of their research skills than I do.

Party websites are marketing tools not repositories of the truth.

marleyboy

The internet may be edited to hide the blemishes of past. But the public never do forget what was and is said. Maybe Camecon's next mission will be to hire Derren Brown for his next political broadcast.

Kennyboy66

vivatifosi wrote: »

But what they have already said will already have been picked up by the Wayback Machine and going forward it will be archived by the British Library, so they won't get away with it. Once things are in the public domain, that's it. Plus, if someone thought they were hiding something, a Wikileaks type website duplicating stuff would appear before you could say abracadabra.

They specifically blocked access to the Wayback Machine (which is not a comprehensive permanent archive). Perhaps they are just more competent than Labour.

Similarly the famous Bullingdon club photo with Cameron, Osborne and Johnson can now not be published in any print media.

Traditional investigative journalism in print and TV is dying. No wonder political parties want to delete selective parts of their past on the internet.

"He who controls the past controls the future"

vivatifosi

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

Traditional investigative journalism in print and TV is dying. No wonder political parties want to delete selective parts of their past on the internet.

"He who controls the past controls the future"

I find the death of investigative journalism truly depressing. I agree that the free press abused its privilege in terms of, for example, how the Dowlers were treated, however we need that same press to uncover abuses of power, now as much as ever before.

Off topic, but have recently read Undercover, by Lewis and Francis, about abuse of power by undercover police. Every now and again it is good to read something that gives you a good shake and makes you angry and active. Complacency is the enemy of democracy. We need more stuff like that.

System

It's not in the least Orwellian. They don't have access to the real news media, so the speeches etc are still in public domain. It's no more than re-writing your CV because some of your past experience is no longer relevant to the jobs you are now applying for.

If you made an embarrassing speech in a school debate 20 years ago you don't have to go on publicising it on your website.

Kennyboy66

Clifford_Pope wrote: »

It's not in the least Orwellian. They don't have access to the real news media, so the speeches etc are still in public domain. It's no more than re-writing your CV because some of your past experience is no longer relevant to the jobs you are now applying for.

If you made an embarrassing speech in a school debate 20 years ago you don't have to go on publicising it on your website.

What is the real news media ?

Newspapers are dying on their !!!!, TV news and Radio are dominated by the state BBC - and not many have managed to crack making money from internet news (Financial Times is one of the few really successful ones).

In making it much harder to find what Tory speeches and policies were a Tory spokesman said;

“These changes allow people to quickly and easily access the most important information we provide.”

A splendid bit of Doublespeak.

Please point me in the direction where I can find this deleted info prior to 2004 (when the British Library started archiving this stuff).

Kennyboy66

vivatifosi wrote: »

I find the death of investigative journalism truly depressing. I agree that the free press abused its privilege in terms of, for example, how the Dowlers were treated, however we need that same press to uncover abuses of power, now as much as ever before.

Off topic, but have recently read Undercover, by Lewis and Francis, about abuse of power by undercover police. Every now and again it is good to read something that gives you a good shake and makes you angry and active. Complacency is the enemy of democracy. We need more stuff like that.

that looks a really good read.