The people who manage the Wayback Machine “Internet Archive” have just posted a complete bullshit excuse trying to explain away the removal of MSNBC host Joy Reid’s homophobic anti-gay blog posts.
Untrustworthy Wayback Machine Website Posts Bullshit Excuse For Removed Damning Homophobic Anti-Gay Joy Reid Posts
Joy Reid admits to, and has apologized for homophobic anti-gay posts that she made in 2007, 2008, and 2009, including homophobic conspiracies and anti-gay jokes, but now she wants us to believe that the latest anti-gay slurs coming from her pea-brain were “fraudulent” posts written by hackers? Yea, right… That’s COMPLETE BULLSHIT!
The Wayback Machine people say that they had received correspondence from Joy Reid’s lawyers demanding that the website take down embarrassing homophobic posts buy MSNBC’s Joy Reid that were posted to her personal blog, which they claimed were “fraudulent”, and claim that they denied the removal requests.
Then they say that Joy Reid’s homophobic posts were taken down, without their knowledge, by someone posting a robots.txt file (exclusion request) on the originating website, which in turn made the Wayback Machine servers automatically delete the damaging homophobic tweets that would be very embarrassing to Joy Reid and damaging to her career.
This is a complete bullshit lie, and anyone who deals with websites and web servers knows that what they say happened could never actually happen. It seems that the people who run the Wayback Machine are trying to pull a fast one on the American People using technical info and terms that most Americans wouldn’t be able to understand.
A robots.txt exclusion request is a way for a website to tell web crawlers and other websites, like search engines and other archiving websites, to not archive specific content on that website, but it cannot change the content already downloaded to another server.
We’re sure that the “blog URL which previously pointed to an msnbc.com page now points to a generic parked page” which would be the first thing that MSNBC and Joy Reid would have done to make the content links go nowhere to further hide the fact that Joy Reid is an gay-hating hypocrite, but the rest is a bald-faced lie by Wayback Machine.
The truth seems to be that the Joy Reid’s lawyer’s requests to remove Reid’s anti-gay posts was granted, and the Wayback Machine manually removed the content.
There really is no way around that, and any attempt to tell the American People otherwise is an attempt to deceive people into believing that they did nothing wrong, and stop the backlash that they are currently receiving.
This also begs the question of what other embarrassing content the Wayback Machine people have removed off their so-called “archive” for other “high-profile” idiots who didn’t want their thoughts and writings to be available to the American People?
My thought is that there is probably a LOT more that the Wayback Machine people have removed to help coverup damaging things for other supposed “high-profile” people.
Some recent press stories (1, 2) have discussed archived blog posts of a prominent journalist, Joy Ann Reid, in the Wayback Machine and her claims that some of these posts were “manipulated” by an “unknown, external party”.
This past December, Reid’s lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that “fraudulent” posts were “inserted into legitimate content” in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is still unclear to us).
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.
We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid’s being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.
At some point after our correspondence, a robots.txt exclusion request specific to the Wayback Machine was placed on the live blog. That request was automatically recognized and processed by the Wayback Machine and the blog archives were excluded, unbeknownst to us (the process is fully automated). The robots.txt exclusion from the web archive remains automatically in effect due to the presence of the request on the live blog. Also, the blog URL which previously pointed to an msnbc.com page now points to a generic parked page.
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