A citizen-powered web
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 9:32 am
The Wayback Machine supports everyday people to help it archive the internet. Anyone can go to Save Page Now to archive a webpage or article.
The Wayback Machine partners with 1,200 fact-checking organizations globally to help it reference material on the web that was the source of disinformation. It has built a library of more than 200,000 examples where a claim has been made, and the Wayback Machine has provided additional context on if that claim is true (known as a review of the claim).
Archive of facts
Fixing links, archiving webpages, and fact-checking digital articles are part of a deeper, more important project to chronicle digital history and establish a record of facts.
Last month, the archive of press releases from a sitting member of Congress, New York’s Elise Stefanik, vanished after she came under scrutiny. The Wayback Machine documented this erasure and provided a time-stamped record of past versions of her website and press releases.
In 2018, a US Appeals court ruled that the Wayback Machine’s archive of webpages can be used as legitimate legal evidence.
The Internet Archive has countless examples of when the press have referenced the Wayback Machine to correct disinformation and dispel rumors. In one example from last year, the Associated Press relied on phone number database the Wayback Machine to set the record that the CDC did not say the polio vaccine gave millions of Americans a “cancer virus.”
With the rise of AI-generated disinformation, there’s reason to believe such attempts at rewriting history (even if that history is just yesterday) will become more prevalent and the social contract that has governed web crawlers is coming to an end.
Building digital archives is a bulwark against those attempting to rewrite history and spread misinformation. An archived, time-stamped webpage is not just unimpeachable evidence, it’s a foundational building block of a shared sense of reality.
In 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 went down over Ukraine, the Wayback Machine captured evidence that a pro-Russian group was behind the missile attack. But it wasn’t the Wayback Machine’s algorithms that captured the evidence by crawling the internet; it was an individual who found an obscure blog post from a Ukrainian separatist leader touting the shooting down of a plane. That individual identified the blogpost as important enough to be archived, and it became a critical piece of evidence, even after that post disappeared from the internet.
As Graham said, “You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. If you see something, save something.”
What pages can you help archive? Archive them with the Wayback Machine on Save Page Now.
The Wayback Machine partners with 1,200 fact-checking organizations globally to help it reference material on the web that was the source of disinformation. It has built a library of more than 200,000 examples where a claim has been made, and the Wayback Machine has provided additional context on if that claim is true (known as a review of the claim).
Archive of facts
Fixing links, archiving webpages, and fact-checking digital articles are part of a deeper, more important project to chronicle digital history and establish a record of facts.
Last month, the archive of press releases from a sitting member of Congress, New York’s Elise Stefanik, vanished after she came under scrutiny. The Wayback Machine documented this erasure and provided a time-stamped record of past versions of her website and press releases.
In 2018, a US Appeals court ruled that the Wayback Machine’s archive of webpages can be used as legitimate legal evidence.
The Internet Archive has countless examples of when the press have referenced the Wayback Machine to correct disinformation and dispel rumors. In one example from last year, the Associated Press relied on phone number database the Wayback Machine to set the record that the CDC did not say the polio vaccine gave millions of Americans a “cancer virus.”
With the rise of AI-generated disinformation, there’s reason to believe such attempts at rewriting history (even if that history is just yesterday) will become more prevalent and the social contract that has governed web crawlers is coming to an end.
Building digital archives is a bulwark against those attempting to rewrite history and spread misinformation. An archived, time-stamped webpage is not just unimpeachable evidence, it’s a foundational building block of a shared sense of reality.
In 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 went down over Ukraine, the Wayback Machine captured evidence that a pro-Russian group was behind the missile attack. But it wasn’t the Wayback Machine’s algorithms that captured the evidence by crawling the internet; it was an individual who found an obscure blog post from a Ukrainian separatist leader touting the shooting down of a plane. That individual identified the blogpost as important enough to be archived, and it became a critical piece of evidence, even after that post disappeared from the internet.
As Graham said, “You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. If you see something, save something.”
What pages can you help archive? Archive them with the Wayback Machine on Save Page Now.