Meet the Activist Archivists Saving the Internet From the Digital Dustbin

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawls and caches websites to preserve a history of deleted pages. The Wayback Machine has archived a large amount of the public web over the past two decades, adding more than a billion URLs a day to its databases. The archive has over 468 billion web pages in total, and more than 45 petabytes of data. A new partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which caches a static version of websites, has had promising results. Powering Cloudflare’s work with the Wayback Machine’s interface has allowed them to find more sites to archive.

In the 1980s, a virtual messaging network, then known as bulletin board systems (BBSs), acted as a support group for many who were in search of peer support and reliable information as the AIDS epidemic spread. Although the site was a grassroots effort with little to no financial stability, it grew to 500 daily users and 100 messages posted per day.

Talk2020 is a searchable database from the Wall Street Journal with thousands of transcripts from presidential and vice-presidential candidates’ campaign speeches, media appearances, debates, and more. Users can filter by issue, date, candidate, or keyword to find quotes and facts about a candidate’s record. It began as an internal tool to help reporters and editors working in the D.C. bureau frame and inform their own journalism, but focus groups showed that news consumers also wanted to be able to quickly locate quotes and facts for their own edification and to support fact-based debates with others.

With human injustices affecting people on the streets around the world, camera phones have become important tools to document crimes. However, the video may not adequately capture the crime to be persuasive in court. The global organization WITNESS has formed as Video As Evidence Program to instruct citizens how to best document crimes with their cameras so that the evidence will stand in court.

The Everywhere Is Queer mobile app houses a directory of over 13,000 LGBTQ+-owned brick-and-mortar and online businesses, services and community groups around the world. The app features a map that highlights LGBTQ+-friendly businesses and safe spaces for members of the community and allies to frequent. The app also features a job board and access to therapists and has been downloaded over 80,0000 times since February.

In an effort to address a lack of broadband access, Indigenous communities are working together, and with local organizations, to acquire funding to bring internet access to their communities and close the digital divide.

SafiriSalama.com is a funeral-tech startup that provides people with a way to memorialize their loved ones online, as well as connect with professionals in the funeral industry. Since the website’s beta launch in November 2022, it has seen over 67,000 visitors and more than 478 tributes and 2,000 memorial pictures have been shared to the site.

To combat the banned books war and issues with book access, the Books Unbanned program offers free online access to the library’s entire collection for 13-to-21-year-olds. The program has already issued more than 5,100 cards and checked out 20,000 materials. And because the program is funded independently, it can offer books to people out of state.

To make internet connectivity accessible and affordable across Africa, Dr. Harold Omondi developed “internet from the moon,” a technology that uses satellite dishes to communicate with transponders placed in the moon several years ago by NASA. The transponders can send and receive information and, since the moon keeps the same side of its surface pointed towards earth, the connection cannot be lost. Still in the piloting phase, the system currently offers free internet at Jomo Kenyatta University, where over 1,200 people login every day, and has another station in South Sudan serving 300-500 people daily.

By leveraging technology, artists living above the 60th parallel are increasing indigenous representation in filmmaking. In Yellowknife, Canada, aRTLess Collective’s Dead North Film Festival uses live streaming to reach thousands of residents across remote—and otherwise largely inaccessible—northern areas. The film festival connects and empowers indigenous northerners to represent themselves and their culture through film.