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Vent: my local news site scrubbed 12 articles overnight and nobody will say why
I check the same city paper every morning with my coffee and about 3 weeks ago I noticed a whole batch of stories just gone from the site. It was 12 articles, all from around the same month back in 2019, all about a chemical plant fire near the river on the east side. I only caught it because I had bookmarked two of them for a thing I was working on. The URLs now dump you on a 404 page, and the Wayback Machine snapshots from before that date are gone too, which is the part that really bugs me. I emailed the paper twice and got one reply saying they "regularly update archives" with no other info. Since when does updating an archive mean deleting the actual archive? Has anyone else watched their local outlet quietly erase a story like this?
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mia_singh241mo ago
Man, the Wayback Machine thing is what gets me, since those snapshots don't vanish on their own. Someone has to file a removal request with the Archive to make old captures disappear, which means a real person went out of their way to hide this. Did you happen to save copies of those two bookmarked articles anywhere offsite, like a personal drive or a printout?
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terry8501mo ago
Yikes, @mia_singh24, maybe they scrubbed the request log too?
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