The Second Burning of the Library of Alexandria – The Attack on Archive.org, Misinformation and the Rise of Fascism

Many people look at the burning of the library of Alexandria and wonder how such desecration of information was allowed to occur. Something on a similar scale is occurring quietly right now and it’s going to change our lives without us knowing.

Before we continue, it is important to understand the importance of archivism and the Internet Archive, not only in a historical context, but also from a technology and activism standpoint. It is crucial to know exactly what things are like to be able to know how to improve them or rally for change and most importantly, prevent the spread of misinformation. 

Archive.org or the Internet Archive, is one such archive that has been chronicling everything happening on the internet since it was set up in 1994, by “crawling websites” and then “mirroring them” and displaying them with its Wayback machine. It has been a beloved and accurate source for information on old, lost or defunct websites and has been a beacon of access to information, even being used as evidence in court to convict cases. 

Until suddenly, this beacon stopped shining.

In October 2024, its service was hit by a DDOS (Denial of Service) attack that compromised its security and introduced a level of system failure that caused the website to have to be taken down. It was brought back, as archive.org contributors worked around the clock to save the service. However, to people’s dismay, it came back as a read-only service, of data collected before the attack. It has not been displaying data from after the attack.  While many believe that data crawling and archiving are still occurring behind the scenes, many believe this is the last straw, hurling us into the age of misinformation. 

People are grim about the situation because the archives being hit is only a part (albeit a significant one) of a larger attack on information that is being orchestrated covertly. Whether it was the usage of Facebook data to manipulate the flow of information and opinions, which helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election, or Brexit, data is being used more and more by big entities to obscure the truth and manipulate people for personal gain. The Archive org attack was also suspiciously close to the US Presidential election and many believe  the two may be connected. This is also because Google's cached pages services, another tool to search for cached pages on the internet, was discontinued, even though Google possesses the storage space to manage it. 

More recently, since the advent of Generative AI and language learning models, Google has replaced its old way of displaying search results with a key information pop-up of a relevant website with an AI summary of all the information the user may need. The order in which search results were listed has also changed due to change in the criteria. Earlier, the basis of listing in the first few results was user behaviour, links, citations, etc which are quantifiable metrics. Now, however, more opaque, subjective criteria such as “trusted sources” are in place.

While the integration of Generative AI in search engines has been lauded as a major step ahead from a technological standpoint, the situation isn't so black and white. Many websites use AI to optimize SEO keywords for their marketing goals to rank high in the search results, without providing any real utility to the users. There has been a major outcry about Google Search being effectively useless because of its search results being clogged with marketing messages, and AI- generated content, leaving people scrambling to find real sources of information. 

A big study on this topic was conducted, titled “Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines” by academics from the University of Leipzig, the Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar and ScaDS.AI, in Germany. It was generally found that pages seen higher in the search results were “more monetised with affiliate marketing and they show signs of lower text quality” Despite Google releasing SEO best practices that require pages to have high quality, useful content researchers have found that pages find it easy to find loopholes and “an overall downwards trend in text quality is seen”. AI has also controversially been used by important news platforms such as Forbes, the Washington Post, Bloomberg and Reuters, among others. This is dangerous, as generative AI is a language learning model, and does not display accurate factual information. 

But why should we care so much about the dilution of information and the lack of real sources of information? For this, it is important to look at the minute changes that have been steadily occurring in our political atmosphere since the beginning of this year. A global trend is slowly forming and is already raising alarm for many. Fascism. 

For the past two years, many far-right politicians and parties have been steadily gaining approval. Whether this is a result of  pushback against “woke” ideals by traditionalists trying to preserve the status quo, or arising out of the global economic crisis and deepening income inequality, the signs are there, people are more concerned about survival than liberty, and the perceived “uniting force” of the nationalism (usually revolving around control and censorship of expression in favour of ideas that “benefit” the nation state) of many far right politicians is believed to  answer to everyone’s woes. This trend has been seen in Hungary with Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, in Brazil with followers of Jair Bolsnaro attempting to overthrow the government of Lula de Silva in a similar way to the January 6th, 2021 insurrection in Washington by the supporters of Trump as well as Geert Wilder’s overtly anti-Muslim Freedom Party emerging as the largest party in the Netherlands, who are generally known to lean centre-left. 

This is creating a uniquely perfect condition for the rise of Generative AI and language learning models. Fascism runs on the suppression of freedom of speech and the supposed furthering of national interest by spreading (usually fake or sensationalised) information that arouses hatred and anger amongst the masses. The attack on archivism, one of the only things that can be used to counter mass hysteria and misinformation and  hold politicians accountable as well as the rise of AI, which is perfect for spreading wrong facts and ideas, are all helping breed and support more fascism.  

Thus, it is important, now more than ever, to verify the  sources of information and not to believe everything that is shown to us to be real. It is important to know the facts and ensure that misinformation is not spread. It is not enough to not interact with those spreading misinformation; we must educate those who fall prey to such incitement, to ensure that individual freedoms and the ideals of democracy are not lost.