Web pages preserved for posterity in the Wayback Machine are now subject to fact-checking.
The Wayback Machine is an online digital library containing more than 488 billion web pages saved at different points in time, so the public can access older or archived versions of websites (like PCMag.com from 10 years ago, pictured above).
Now some of these archived websites are being fact-checked to add context to what the public sees. The fact-checking isn’t integrated into the web page itself but is an optional source of additional information at the top of the page.
For example, it snapshotted a May 2017 CNN article titled “What the GOP health care bill really says about pre-existing conditions.” That article was fact-checked by Politifact, so now the archived web page has a yellow banner above it stating, “Context related to this Web page from Politifact can be found here. Context matching provided by Our.News.”
Another article, “Electoral mockery in the United States: a view from within,” was found to be part of a disinformation campaign. Researchers at Graphika included the article in a report titled Exposing Secondary Infektion, which it termed “a series of operations run by a large-scale, persistent threat actor from Russia.” The Wayback Machine linked to the report at the top of the archived web page.
Add the Wayback Machine to Chrome, Safari, or Firefox via a browser extension or automatically integrate it with the Brave desktop browser to access archived versions of websites.
