Article in Columbia Journalism Review in The Media Today by Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen, 2/13/25
Headline: “Fighting the Great Federal Website Purge”
Subhead: “Journalists, judges, and archivists are keeping government data online.”
“Two weeks ago, when the new administration instructed agencies to scrub content related to ‘gender ideology’ from government websites, federal workers scrambled to comply, temporarily, and in some cases permanently, taking pages offline so that they might be monitored for language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. As reported by Popular Information this week, the National Security Agency is reportedly now executing a purge of pages that contain terms including ‘privilege’ and ‘bias’ — a dragnet that is also affecting ‘mission-related’ work, according to a source and documents. The discussion around so-called ‘banned words,’ as well as the deletion of datasets inconsistent with the administration’s ideology, has left data archivists concerned.
The news media has been busy keeping track of many of the webpages that have gone dark. At the beginning of this month, the New York Times put the number of removed pages at eight thousand; Wired is periodically scanning more than a thousand government domains for their accessibility. Such projects may prove especially useful down the line, not just to the public, but to the media industry itself . . . ”
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_administration_website_purge_court_order_cdc.php
