Abstract
The current U.S. administration is intentionally undermining public access to information as well as scholarly research by removing documents, reports, datasets, images, and language from government websites. In doing so, this administration is withholding publicly-funded information that we have a right to access, including data from government-sponsored research, historical information about marginalized groups, and speech transcripts. In removing these materials, the government is also deliberately sabotaging research related to topics it does not like, such as LGBTQ health, COVID, and climate change.
It is difficult to grasp the scope of this problem: how do we know when something is gone, and how can we measure how much has been removed? We are grateful for amazing rescue and tracking efforts focused on government data, who have led the way on the effort to salvage this information. We believe it is also important to track missing documents, removed websites, and modified language, which can be more challenging to quantify.
The Tracking Gov Info project is a crowdsourcing effort to track removed and modified government information and resources and to point people to archived copies of content whenever possible. Join us to hear what we’ve learned through our project so far about the history of this topic, scope of current information loss and censorship, the challenges of documenting these attacks on information, and how attendees can get involved.