The Internet Archive rejects MSNBC host Joy Reid’s claim that her old blog was hacked

24 Apr The Internet Archive rejects MSNBC host Joy Reid’s claim that her old blog was hacked

Sometimes the “I got hacked!” excuse just doesn’t cut it. That was MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid’s explanation for old blog posts containing homophobic statements that recently surfaced. She made the claim after Twitter user @Jamie_maz tweeted a series of screen shots of sections from Reid’s website, The Reid Report, found via the Wayback Machine–the Internet Archive’s tool for retrieving old Webpages–since the links had since been removed.

Reid, in a statement to Mediaite yesterday, made a bizarre claim—not that the blog post screen shots themselves were fake, but instead that the text of the posts had been manipulated by an “unknown, external party” after the fact. Essentially, Reid was claiming that someone had hacked the Internet Archive to alter her posts to include these offensive statements.

But the Internet Archive says it found no evidence of such hacking. According to a new blog post: “When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions.” The post continues: “At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.”

The Internet Archive says Reid’s lawyers contacted the organization back in December, claiming that “fraudulent” text had been “inserted into legitimate content,” and asking the organization to take those posts offline. The organization refused that request, explaining that Reid’s attorneys had not provided enough information. After that, a robot.txt exclusion was introduced to her blog, which resulted in the archives being removed.

I reached out to Reid for comment and will update this post if I hear back.

Source: Fast Company