Person:

Bowers, John

Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the web can also be modified, moved, or entirely disappeared. This often-irreversible decay of web content is commonly known as linkrot. It comes with a similar problem of content drift, or the often-unannounced changes––retractions, additions, replacement––to the content at a particular URL.    Our team of researchers at Harvard Law School has undertaken a project to gain insight into the extent and characteristics of journalistic linkrot and content drift. We examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles starting with the launch of the Times website in 1996 up through mid-2019, developed on the basis of a dataset provided to us by the Times. We focus on the Times not because it is an influential publication whose archives are often used to help form a historical record. Rather, the substantial linkrot and content drift we find here across the New York Times corpus accurately reflects the inherent difficulties of long-term linking to pieces of a volatile web.   Results show a near linear increase of linkrot over time, with interesting patterns emerging within certain sections of the paper or across top level domains. Over half of articles containing at least one URL also contained a dead link. Additionally, of the ostensibly “healthy” links existing in articles, a hand review revealed additional erosion to citations via content drift.

The governance of online platforms has unfolded across three eras – the era of Rights (which stretched from the early 1990s to about 2010), the era of Public Health (from 2010 through the present), and the era of Process (of which we are now seeing the first stirrings). Rights-era conversations and initiatives amongst regulators and the public at large centered dominantly on protecting nascent spaces for online discourse against external coercion. The values and doctrine developed in the Rights era have been vigorously contested in the Public Health era, during which regulators and advocates have focused (with minimal success) on establishing accountability for concrete harms arising from online content, even where addressing those harms would mean limiting speech. In the era of Process, platforms, regulators, and users must transcend this stalemate between competing values frameworks, not necessarily by uprooting Rights-era cornerstones like CDA 230, but rather by working towards platform governance processes capable of building broad consensus around how policy decisions are made and implemented. Some promising steps in this direction could include delegating certain key policymaking decisions to entities outside of the platforms themselves; making platforms “information” or “content” fiduciaries; and systematically archiving data and metadata about disinformation detected and addressed by platforms.