I’ve watched Joy regularly for the last several years, and I find it impossible to believe Joy is some homophobe. Has she written some problematic comments in the past? Maybe, but I’m going to need to see the posts and the context because I just don’t believe this.
17 Likes
It’s worth reading the Internet Archive’s statement in full:
http://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims-of-manipulated-blog-posts-in-the-wayback-machine/
This illuminating bit of context comes right before the statement you point to as being carefully couched:
Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is still unclear to us).
With that context, the careful wording about where the Wayback Machine looked for signs of tampering seems a lot less suspicious.
The issue of the Wayback Machine’s being hacked appears to be somewhat unclear in the TPM article as well. Again from the Internet Archive statement:
At some point after our correspondence, a robots.txt exclusion request specific to the Wayback Machine was placed on the live blog. That request was automatically recognized and processed by the Wayback Machine and the blog archives were excluded, unbeknownst to us (the process is fully automated). The robots.txt exclusion from the web archive remains automatically in effect due to the presence of the request on the live blog.
My interpretation of that is the Internet Archive was not hacked, and still has the relevant data. However, it is inaccessible from their public website. I suspect their policy regarding robots.txt comes out of the enormous copyright kerfluffle they were caught up in about a decade ago.
4 Likes
If this were a Fox host, we’d all be calling for boycotts and firings. Her explanation is just flat-out bullshit. She should be ashamed and MSNBC should end the double standard. She should not be their weekend anchor harboring these views.
3 Likes
“I was hacked” = “I wrote them myself!”
I don’t believe her evolving tale. Sad.
2 Likes
I don’t know how you arrived at that interpretation from that gobbledygook of that paragraph. I read it too and I was just about to ask what the fuck does all that mean?
Again, here’s the paragraph:
At some point after our correspondence, a robots.txt exclusion request specific to the Wayback Machine was placed on the live blog. That request was automatically recognized and processed by the Wayback Machine and the blog archives were excluded, unbeknownst to us (the process is fully automated). The robots.txt exclusion from the web archive remains automatically in effect due to the presence of the request on the live blog. Also, the blog URL which previously pointed to an msnbc.com page now points to a generic parked page.
“…and the blog archives were excluded, unbeknownst to us (the process is fully automated).”
Really?
If that’s how the Wayback Machine works, oy vey.
“Also, the blog URL which previously pointed to an msnbc.com page now points to a generic parked page.”
Now you gotta admit…that’s just a wee bit suspicious, don’t you?
3 Likes
Folks, take a close look at the third paragraph in this story. Then ask yourself why would Joy Reid apologize for the homophobic blog posts in December if she did not write them? See the problem?
3 Likes
Hmmm.
This has all the hallmarks of a “Roger Stone/Russian Troll Army - RatFuck” project to discredit a rising star in the Liberal Media.
It would not surprise me in the least that she was hacked. It’s so easy to do, and there are lots of sub-reddit trolls who get their jollies this way.
13 Likes
The Internet Archive added that after they declined to remove the posts, the archives disappeared due to an action carried out by an unauthorized third party.
…so an “unauthorized third party” can disappear parts of the archive, and we’re supposed to believe that the Wayback can’t be hacked?
5 Likes
Yeah the robot exclusion would just tell their web crawlers not to make new recordings of the site assuming they have set their crawlers to respect those exclusion request, which I understand is their standard policy. It wouldn’t, however, get rid of their existing archival files for the site, which are what one would normally use to go back and look at older versions of a site using the wayback machine. Blocking access to those archives in response to the robot exclusion most be a policy decision they made.
1 Like
If the Wayback machine is hackable, we’re in for some Orwellian shit, all right.
2 Likes
My read on the last part is that they’re saying they think Joy Reid’s people inserted an automated takedown bot.txt onto the blog that triggered removal on Wayback and took the blog offline. So that part, at least, is less suspect now.
But as to the rest, we have a cautionary adage in my business: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Absence of fingerprints at the scene isn’t evidence you weren’t really burglarized and your claim things were stolen is really an insurance scam.
And the corollary to that is if evidence isn’t there, it may well be because someone took steps to destroy it or not leave it. Maybe the burglar wore gloves.
They are treating their inability to find evidence of hacking as proof they weren’t hacked and couching their messaging in a way intended to make people read it that way while giving themselves a fallback because they know they’ve proven no such thing. It’s positively Greenwaldian. And I find that suspect.
14 Likes
The problem being that you missed the part where additional homophobic messages were added to the blog post which made things look worse to smear her?
4 Likes
Congratulations on earning that “first post” badge.
12 Likes
The reason why I believe Reid is simple.
All these “new” examples predate the stuff about Crist, etc that Reid already apologized for. It would therefore make sense to just reiterate the same apology, and say that she has evolved, as her record amply demonstrates.
In other words, she doesn’t need to claim to have been hacked.
9 Likes
The problem is that you don’t see the problem.
The posts we’re talking about here aren’t the ones she apologized for. They are “new” posts that seem to have surfaced out of nowhere. Having owned up to the old ones, she would have owned up to the ones we’re talking about now if they were authentic.
14 Likes
The idea that the Wayback machine can be hacked makes me nervous. I guess it was inevitable that something we depend on as absolute truth would get fucked up by someone with malignant intent.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
3 Likes
Perhaps using Cyrillic characters would make comprehension easier for the newbie to understand.
4 Likes
The Internet Wayback Machine works by having web crawlers crawl the internet recording websites and compiling them into .arc files. The Wayback Machine then stores those .arc files and makes then visible as basically a snapshot of what a website looked at the point in time that it was crawled. I will admit I’m not entirely clear on how often they will hit a particular site or if they will hit some sites more frequently than others, but most sites I have looked at seem to get hit a couple of times a week.
A robot.txt exclusion in this situation tells the web crawlers not to record the site. From the comment provide it sounds like the exclusion in this situation was aimed specifically at the Internet Archives web crawler as opposed to say Google or any other groups.
Now that would just mean that IA would stop recording new .arc snapshots it wouldn’t get rid of the existing files. From what the commentor you were responding to was saying, however, it sounds like IA may have set their public ui system to automatically hide sites that add the rebot.txt exclusion in response to some previous copyright conflicts.
Adding the robot.txt exclusion and the last bit about redirecting the site url are both things that could be done on the blog websites end, whether by the site admn or a hacker and there wouldn’t be anyway for IA to tell one way or the other from their end. All they would know is an exclusion was added and a url changed.
3 Likes
And that’s how you take down a liberal “fake news” journalist. See how easy that was? The key, leading up to November, is to target and silence those who speak out against Trumpism.
I hope MSNBC supports her but once the rightwing propaganda machine gets going and pressure mounts they will decide to let her go. Our loss.
3 Likes
I have a hard time believing she said things like this, it seems totally out of character. Give her the same consideration you gave Franken.
FIRE HER!