It seems that are archives of electronic information can function as a "memory hole" with either replacement or erasure as the end goal.
Some of the adjustments seem to be done in phases, where over a period
of time the recorded original is incrementablly replaced.
Some archives are started with replacement materials, and likely never existed in the archived form originally.
Have you seen the memory hole in action?
Take the case of the UTZOO Usenet archives, containing a treasure trove of old Usenet posts. For some time these were hosted on the Internet Archive but some character claimed copyright on some of his old posts, which were, it is rumored, embarrassing to him in some way. Accordingly he could then issue takedown notices for anyone hosting the UTZOO archive, depriving people of the whole archive.
Eventually such a request was sent to the Internet Archive. Jason Scott, who you may have heard of, complied with this request because his only other option was finding the specific posts of this user, removing them, then uploading the rest of the now-modified archive.
However, he didn't want to deal with the fallout of people accusing him of editing this archive to cover something up (or whatever conspiracy theory people could come up with) so he just pulled them offline entirely, this being the least annoying option.
*whistles nonchalantly*
https://archive.org/details/utzoo-squashed-fs
One of the best reasons to be a data hoarder and to archive any information which could potentially disappear is for this reason.
Of course, one of the problems is because most information published on the Internet is not cryptographically signed, republication of previously redacted information could be dismissed as fabricated "fake news."
There is no way to authenticate suddenly unearthed information from a private hard drive that has been somehow removed from the Internet. You could simply claim it was synthesized and is fake.
In this way, it is possible to gaslight the whole of the world. In recent years, we have substituted magical thinking, narratives, and reality tunnels, for objective reality: we are spiraling on the event horizon of an epistemological black hole.
And in a way this blindsided me. I was aware that electronic media were always going to be used to spread falsehoods and propaganda; what I did not predict was that in light of this, people would then use the mental environment to simply dismiss everything that didn't fit into their frame as "fake."
This is the real danger. The process by which we authenticate information for its veracity is completely broken. And everyone feels as though they are uniquely privy to a kind of insight or worldview in which they uniquely can guage the accuracy of information - this would include the completeness of information as well.
AI is getting better and better at creating fake speech and images. See:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaSynthesis/
The older and lower resolution a piece of data is, the easier it is probably going to be to fake it.
Cryptographic signatures and the blockchain especially could be harnessed to prevent this sort of thing but we aren't there yet. But a blockchain-based system could potentially conflict with the GDPR's "Right to be forgotten," because there is no way to remove something from a blockchain.
However, herein lies the key: it is unlikely we will ever convince governments or powerful entities to do the right thing. It is necessary, therefore, to utilize technology to make the memory hole and related gaslighting of humankind impossible.
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (700:100/72)