What a modern day book burning looks like

[Takket]

In the old days you had to actually burn books to destroy their information to ensure an ignorant and controllable public. These days, thanks to modern technology, no need to burn books when you can just change what they say to suit your needs.


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Prior to the election of the business-worshipping, union-busting, climate denying Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, the state's Department of Natural Resources website was a rich trove of information about climate change -- as you'd expect from a state with a lot of fresh water, where resource extraction played an important part in the economy.

For years now, the DNR's website has been systematically, silently flensed of mentions of climate change, even as the governor has publicly contemplated shutting down the DNR altogether.

The latest science to get a political whitewash is the DNR's page on the Great Lakes and climate change, whose rewrite would do Orwell proud.
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https://boingboing.net/2017/01/01/scott-walkers-wisconsin-cont.html

[sarah FAILIN]

1. Little to do with your topic

But I had a regular news story be completely changed on me. It was about some kid that used her sleeping mothers fingerprint to buy $250 worth of Pokémon toys online. The mass of the comments on the story were along the thought that the little girl needed punishment instead of being rewarded with getting to keep the toys and some people mentioned things in the article, specifically that the Elf on the shelf took the items to Santa so he could give them to the kid. The article was rewritten by someone else and all the info was left out that made the kid look bad or the mom look like an enabler. It was crazy. I found 2 different versions of the same article and the newest one was just a blurb compared to the first. It never occurred to me that online media would be so easily changed.

[forgotmylogin]

2. Orwell knew what was up.

He had the Ministry employees physically copying and pasting articles to alter them. Now it can be done electronically.

[sarah FAILIN]

3. scary

I only realized because I said something that was in the first version and was "called out" on it by someone reading the story after it was changed. No edit history available there, lol. Anyone can change history and you not know if you if you didn't live it.

[Jim Lane]

4. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine has the old versions archived.

Go to the Internet Archive homepage at https://archive.org//. In the "Wayback Machine" box, enter the URL http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/greatlakes/climatechange.html and you can access several different versions of the page. Even the earliest, from 2012, addresses human activities as a cause of climate change. There are several more snapshots over the succeeding years.