De Britse Conservative Party heeft volgens Computer Weekly geprobeerd om een deel van haar geschiedenis definitief van het internet te verwijderen. Een intrigerend staaltje censuur en geschiedenisvervalsing? Of hoe noem je dat als je je eigen woorden uit het collectief geheugen wil wissen omdat je sedertdien een bocht van 180 graden gemaakt hebt en net het tegenovergestelde doet van wat je een paar jaar geleden beloofde?
“The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election. Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics. But the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010. It also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google, which had been a role model for Cameron and Osborne’s “open source politics”. And it erased the official record of their speeches from the Internet Archive, the public record of the net – with an effect as alarming as sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park.”