Fact Checks and Context for Wayback Machine Pages (opens in new tab)

I looked up your statistics and the reason there is nobody calling it out is because, first, that's not the claim being made (the argument is that they earn far less than equivalently trained professions which is objectively true no matter how you dice it) and, second, teachers really are paid less on a per hour basis than the OECD average which makes your statistic super misleading. In fact, the gap in lifetime earnings compared with other countries gets even bigger when you account for their lower starting salaries as well as lower total compensation (including benefits). Ironically, this is a great example of the system working and not propagating partisan "alternative facts" like what you want.

It's all projection. You just can't imagine people adding reasonable context to contentious information because you know that if you were in that position that you would abuse it like with your misleading teacher claim. Nobody is out to get you and no you are not a victim of some sort of liberal conspiracy. It won't hurt you if you get an occasional dose of reality injected back into your brain if you decide to browse the Wayback Machine during the next Fox News commercial break.

How close does the analogy need to be in order for you to feel comfortable that what Internet Archive are doing is not at all dangerous or unprecedented? While you may not have encountered it, some libraries do label books for content[0]:

> Some libraries block access to certain materials by placing physical or virtual barriers between the user and those materials. For example, materials are sometimes labeled for content or placed in a “locked case,” “adults only,” “restricted shelf,” or “high-demand” collection.

(emphasis mine)

Here’s another real-world example. In the physical world, book publishers often print updated editions of books with corrections, distribute errata, attach disclaimers[1], and sometimes recall books entirely[2]. (If you feel the urge to split hairs here about how one entity is a third-party publisher and the other is a third-party library, please think seriously on how this distinction is relevant to adding context.)

The concerns that the ALA have with labelling in the physical world don’t apply to what IA is doing, since IA are not creating barriers for patrons to access content, they are just adding context—as book publishers, museum curators, librarians, film distributors, documentarians, historians, and others have done for centuries.

[0] http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpret...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/business/media/publisher-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/naomi-wolf-outrages...

I also own a lot of books that contain a lot of falsehoods. I wonder if there will be an inspector.

Your first sentence could be a literal description of the concept of education: telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions.

Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing group-think.

I suspect the next step will be to license journalists, with a background check searching for Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, Cuban and Iranian connections.