I just found out that Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” has been doing its rounds on TikTok but I haven’t seen anything about it been posted here on Lemmy about it. Perhaps people already know about it, I’m not sure. This is a link to the wayback machine. The original in the guardian has just been deleted after being online for 20 years.
To be fair the definition of censorship does not include a newspaper removing some article from their archives on their own accord.
It’s a sign of something much worse, chilling effect, self censorship
It’s pretty bad that newspapers can alter or delete articles from 2 decades ago, without any laws or regulations around revision history etc, though. Altering history because it becomes unappealing to the present is extremely dangerous. That opens the historic record up to complete revision and why internet archives should be viewed and funded like libraries and other historic archives. No present or future entity (public or private) should be able to change history as they see fit.
A legal technicality in no way invalidates the critical role that the media is assumed to play in informing the public in a democracy.
Yes if the government doesn’t make a law forcing someone to take something down it can’t be censorship, you are very smart.