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Language: en
What if I told you that everything
deleted on the internet is never really
gone? For example, this page, which was
published by a Russian government news
outlet, celebrated Russia capturing
Ukraine in February 26, 20122. But they
deleted it once they realized that was
not the case. And even though they
deleted it, it's still available for the
world to see. And what about NASA's
website? Especially where it used to say
NASA will land the first woman, person
of color, and international partner on
the moon. But changes made in March 2025
removed that line. Well, the reason why
these websites haven't vanished is
because of one tool, the internet
archive. And in today's world of
vanishing tweets, edited articles, and
disappearing websites, being able to
retrieve the original version of a web
page can be the difference between truth
and deception. And so in this video, I'm
going to show you some of my favorite
ways to use the internet archive to dig
up deleted content, track online
changes, and search inside of news
broadcasts. Hi everyone, and welcome
back to this series on how to do
open-source investigations at home. I'm
Ben, and this is part 26. So, let's get
started. What is the Wayback Machine in
the Internet Archive? Well, think about
it like if you've ever tried to rewind
the internet like a videotape. Well,
this is the tool to do that. The Wayback
Machine is run by the Internet Archive,
and it lets you see how websites looked
in the past. In this section, I'll give
you a quick tour of what it is, how it
works, and why it matters for your
investigations and research. We've all
seen it when someone posts something
online or a website puts something out
and then sometimes it might vanish. This
NASA article obviously hasn't vanished.
It's on the real internet, but we're
going to use it as an example of how
that can actually be stored. Simply put,
all we have to do is take the URL and
we'll paste that into the tool called
Wayback Machine. And so we can pop that
into save page. Now, sometimes it takes
a few minutes to go through because it's
got a lot of work to do to archive that
page. While that's archiving, let's have
a brief look at how we can find out
about previous websites that might have
been archived. In a previous video, I
spoke about a marketing firm that was
ran out of Indonesia running influence
operations and bot networks. Since then,
that website has been taken down, but we
can easily glean a few more details from
that website through the internet
archive. So, all we have to do is take
the URL, which you can see copied up the
top there. And if I go into Wayback
Machine and pop that URL in there, we
can see just the amount of times that
that might have been archived. So, I'll
take that back to 2019 and see what that
actually used to look like. And there we
have it. Where that website is currently
not available, we're able to see what it
used to look like and the descriptions
on that site when it was actually up and
running, which is really helpful for
research. The second function of the
wayback machine I really want to show
you is how to track changes on websites.
Sometimes you might have the same URL,
but you might have different information
over time. So for an example, I'm going
to go to NASA's Arteimus page, and this
is a brief description of the current
page. So what we'll do is we'll run that
into the Wayback Machine and see just
how many times that's been archived. And
you can see that's actually been
archived quite a fair bit since probably
its publication or the creation of that
URL in mid to late 2023. So we could
open up all of these and identify visual
changes. But actually some of the work's
been done for us to detect that. All we
have to do is click on the changes tab.
Now this might usually take some time to
load but it gives us a chance to have a
look at potential changes that have
happened over the time. So I might do a
pre version in March 5 and I want to
compare that with something a little bit
more recent say September 10. So this
will bring up a visual comparison tool
where at the bottom it describes it as
yellow indicates content deletion and
blue indicates content addition. On the
5th of March we have the website on the
left and on the 10th of September we
have the website on the right.
Specifically, the difference on this
part is this last line here that says
NASA will land the first woman, first
person of color, and first international
partner astronaut on the moon using
innovative technologies to explore more
of the lunar surface than ever before.
On the right, it shows that that's not
there. And we can even double check that
on the current website just to see if
it's still off. And yeah, we can see
that that's still not there. So it shows
that someone has removed that line on
the NASA website and thanks to the
internet archive or the wayback machine
tool, we're able to identify that
change. And that's a really useful way
to use this tool on tracking changes on
websites and showing the difference
between them over time. The third
feature I'd like to show is around this
tab called collections. I'm going to
click the collections tab. It shows what
collections this has been archived to
and we can see some of those there and
then that will open up a new collection.
We can see one called end of term 2024
and we could even check out this
collection and you can see the captures
that have been made under that
collection as well as a timeline of
those collections. The fourth function I
want to show you is just around the
calendar view and reading the calendar a
bit more to identify if there's been a
spike in interest of those pages. And
that calendar function is really quite
useful for that. When we actually load a
page and load a snapshot, we also have
the function up here to click through
those. So you can either use this
function which just takes you back to
the previously archived version. And
then we've got this functionality over
here just to scroll that timeline. And
you can start to see why the Wayback
Machine is so fascinating because
websites like for example the White
House, we can just have a look at the
historical versions there. And this is a
version that we're looking at here from
May 10, 1997.
Very early stages of the internet where
we have web pages of the White House in
a very simple manner which is a
fascinating glimpse into what the
website used to look like. The fifth
function that I really want to go
through is probably one of my favorite
functions and it's in the video section.
So, if you go to the archive.org
homepage up in video and select TV news,
you can also get there by going
archive.org/details/tv.
So, there's a lot of different functions
to this one. You can see the special
collections that they've got here.
They've also got recent quotes that have
been picked up and these really cover
not just English news but many other
channels as well. So you've got Bellarus
TV, Al Jazzer, Press TV, Fox News, CNN,
BBC and many others. So a couple of
quick ways that you can use this. You
can search the captions and I'll open up
advanced search just to show some of the
functionality in there. You can go
through all of these networks. You can
search only quotes. You can have a look
for specific shows and then you've got
the date range function there. I'm going
to type in Yangon which is the city from
Myammar and it's going to load for me
the mentions of Yangon. So we can see
Anthony Bourdain in there, Pierers
Morgan Live, but also BBC World News and
others. On the left function, you can go
through the programs, the creators, the
years as well, and also topics and
subjects. And you can even see a little
timeline which is very useful. many
broadcasts in March 2021, which was just
after the military coup in Yanggon, and
obviously crackdowns on civilians and
protesters in the streets, which were
very violent and a huge level of
oppression afterwards from that. One of
the other things I often like to type in
here is terms around, say, interference
or online interference, like election
interference, and just having a look at
the mentions of those and seeing where
that's been brought up. And that segus
into a very impressive spin-off tool
that allows you to visualize this. And
this is the Gelt summary tool, which
basically uses the data from the TV news
archive and allows you to make
visualizations with that. So I'm going
to type that term into here. When I
click create summary on election
interference, it brings up a nice little
timeline. So where we would usually see
this content brought up in this kind of
way, it brings a bit more of a summary
and overview version and what are some
other terms in this wordcloud that have
been mentioned alongside election
interference but regularly popping up
and then obviously the top clips viewer
as well. I really love that this has
been created so that you can go from
searching in the detail to election
interference and drill down to the exact
video, but also then to zoom back out
and have a look at that bigger picture
of trends and mentions over time so that
you're consistently jumping between
what's being mentioned on a specific
news broadcast at one single time versus
having an overview of all of the
mentions over time. So, we've covered
quite a few interesting tools, and I
think it's important to pay a visit to
the internet archive and the wayback
machine. It's a tool that shows us that
the internet never forgets, and that you
just need to know where to look. And
don't forget to stay tuned for some of
the next sessions on open-source
investigations. Until then, take it
easy.
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