“We’ve Always Been at War with Data Retention”: How Orwell’s Dystopia Became Silicon Valley’s Business Model
Censorship, Historical Rewrites, and the Death of the Physical Copy in the Cloud Age:
Imagine opening a book you once loved only to discover a key passage mysteriously missing. A sentence here softened, a footnote there disappeared, or perhaps an entire chapter has quietly been replaced—without warning, explanation, or even a trace that it ever existed. Welcome to the cloud-bound, AI-policed, Terms-of-Service-defined reality of the 2020s. Or should we say... welcome to Nineteen Eighty-Four?
George Orwell's masterwork was never meant to be an instruction manual, but you'd be forgiven for thinking Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. have confused it for one. The Ministry of Truth may now be called Amazon Web Services, and instead of memory holes, we have algorithmic content removals and quiet retractions. As of the second Trump administration, we are witnessing a chilling uptick in both government-sanctioned and tech-enabled historical revisions it would make O’Brien wish he had such tech.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien is the master manipulator, the state official who convinces protagonist Winston Smith that he’s part of the underground resistance — before dragging him to Room 101 and torturing him into submission. He’s not just a villain; he’s the embodiment of a system that doesn’t punish lies, it rewrites reality.
O’Brien doesn’t debate Winston’s beliefs. He eradicates them. He convinces him that 2 + 2 = 5 not by persuasion, but through pain and repetition until Winston believes it. Because the truth, in Orwell’s dystopia, is not objective. It’s whatever the Party says it is today.
In our world, O’Brien is algorithmic. He’s the terms-of-service bot that deletes your post. He’s the streaming edit that cuts history. He’s the AI moderator trained on what advertisers and governments don’t want you to see.
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
— O’Brien
Our past is being edited in real-time—and we are being trained to neither notice nor care.
The Book That Warned Us—And the World That Didn’t Listen.
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, history is not merely rewritten—it is continuously rewritten. "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." Orwell’s Party routinely revises newspaper archives, deletes unfavourable records, and rewrites books to fit current political narratives. Sound far-fetched? If you're under 35, ask yourself when you last held a physical copy of an important book, news article, or academic paper.
In the digital-first, cloud-only era, the fragility of information has reached unprecedented levels. It’s not just possible to edit history—it’s efficient. And governments and corporations alike are increasingly doing just that.
Selma, Sanitised: Streaming Services and the New Ministry of Truth.
Let’s begin with something you can still watch—sort of. Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), an Oscar-winning film chronicling Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s voting rights marches, appeared on Amazon Prime with key changes in 2023. As documented by Professor Jonathan Chase, a historian and film expert, the Amazon Prime version omitted the historically accurate text at the end of the film regarding the Voting Rights Act’s gutting in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The film's message wasn’t simply shortened; it was softened. Apple TV+ streamed the original, but Amazon—ironically the same company inking deals to stream historical documentaries—aired a censored version. The Amazon version
No update notice. No "edited for runtime" disclaimer. Just a seamless, silent rewrite.
In the Amazon Prime version of Selma, a crucial historical context has quietly vanished. Originally, the film included chilling FBI surveillance memos overlaid on the screen — actual excerpts from J. Edgar Hoover’s department detailing their attempts to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including blackmail threats and suggestions of suicide. These intertitles were not artistic embellishments; they were historical fact.
But in the version streamed on Amazon Prime, those memos are missing. The FBI seal / logo still appears ominously on screen, but the damning words have evaporated. No disclaimer. No "edited for clarity." Just silence — the digital kind that erases rather than forgets. Apple TV, by contrast, still currently retains the original. Whether this was a distribution issue (streaming services receiving different versions at different times) or a quiet compliance maneuver is anyone’s guess, but the effect is the same: historical sanitisation through omission. The bottom line is, some organisation all be it Amazon, the film company or other entity decided to cut it.
One could call it accidental. But history edited without a trace is still history rewritten.
This is not isolated. Disney+, Amazon, and Netflix have edited or removed episodes, altered dialogue, or blurred content in hundreds of shows—including The Simpsons, Community, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The justification? Usually opaque “content policies” or compliance with local sensitivities. But the pattern is clear: the viewer sees what the company (and by extension, the prevailing political climate) allows.
The Streaming Guillotine: Censoring Pop Culture Retroactively.
Streaming platforms are not passive vaults of content — they are editors with an eraser. And they've already quietly rewritten parts of your cultural memory.
The Simpsons – “Stark Raving Dad”.
This episode, featuring Michael Jackson’s voice, was removed from Disney+ in 2019 after renewed scrutiny of Jackson’s alleged abuse. The episode is gone from every official digital release — despite having aired for decades. No public notice was given by Disney+.
More info:
Community – “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”.
This fan-favourite episode was pulled from Netflix and Hulu in 2020 because it featured Ken Jeong's character cosplaying as a "dark elf" — painted entirely black. Though done in a fantasy setting, the platforms cited blackface concerns and pulled it, without discussion or viewer discretion labels.
More info:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer – “Earshot” and “Graduation Day Part 2”:
After Columbine, WB delayed airing these episodes due to school violence themes. “Earshot” features a character with a rifle at school — later revealed not to be a school shooter, but the episode was pulled nonetheless.
More info:
Now, it is fair to acknowledge that certain edits and removals are attributable to cultural shifts in our perspectives on matters such as political correctness or emotional triggers. However, my intention is to demonstrate the feasibility of such actions. Such occurrences are commonplace, and the demarcation of appropriate boundaries in this regard is shifting to official narratives and governmental convenience. All of this raises the same uncomfortable truth: if you didn’t record it, download it, or physically own it — you don’t really have it. You have a licence. And licences change.
History as a Cloud-Service: Why Digital Control Means Historical Control.
In Orwell’s world, “memory holes” incinerated the past. In ours, Terms of Service do the same.
Academic journals have started retracting papers for ideological reasons rather than errors. In 2022, Springer retracted over 400 scientific papers due to “peer review manipulation,” but independent scrutiny revealed that some were withdrawn for purely political reasons—especially those dealing with COVID-19 policy critiques. Worse, entire databases (like JSTOR or ProQuest) can remove access to historical papers if licensing deals change or lawsuits arise.
Meanwhile, search engines—Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo—have steadily evolved into relevance-filtered platforms. An article inconvenient to current political winds? Good luck finding it. Search algorithms deprioritise, bury, or omit results entirely. And with AI summarisation increasingly sitting between users and original content, what you see is now not only filtered, but editorialised on your behalf.
The Perils of AI Summarisation: When Machines Rewrite History.
AI summarisation tools are the new digital scribes — fast, tireless, and disturbingly opinionated. They condense lengthy news stories or academic reports into bite-sized chunks for your distracted convenience. But summarising is not the same as representing. And most of these systems operate in a black box of editorial judgment.
A 2024 investigation by Palos Publishing found that AI-generated summaries of political articles routinely omitted dissenting perspectives, softened contentious claims, and sometimes reframed the author's intent entirely. Not maliciously, perhaps — just algorithmically. And when you don’t have the original open next to the summary, how would you know what was dropped?
Even worse, many of these AI summaries don’t link to or display the original source material. Instead, you’re offered an AI’s idea of what matters — a neatly wrapped package that might leave out the inconvenient, the uncomfortable, or the politically unprofitable.
You can read the full article here:
News sites are no better. The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC have removed or retroactively rewritten old articles without proper addenda. The “update” tag—when it’s used at all—may now mask substantial changes in tone or factual position. Take a tour through the Internet Archive and compare snapshots, if you can still find the originals.
Archived Truths vs. Present Narratives: A Tale of Two Articles.
The past is supposed to be past. But on the internet, the past is editable. Articles get updated. Headlines shift. Claims get removed or downplayed. And unless you're obsessive enough to check archive snapshots — the digital equivalent of microfiche — you’ll never know it happened.
Editorial note:
I started writing this article a few months back. It all started when I began researching articles and noticed something strange. Certain things I’d read in the past were mysteriously disappearing from the internet. It was quite ironic, or maybe not so ironic given what I’ve just said, but these instances of internet wiping have actually come back to bite me in the arse for this very article. Recently, even the Wayback Machine—long considered the internet’s memory vault—has become increasingly unreliable as a permanent source. While once seen as a safeguard against the digital decay of modern journalism and documentation, the Internet Archive has quietly faced mounting pressures: legal takedown requests, government censorship, cyberattacks, and outdated technical policies like the honouring of robots.txt files. This year alone, over 1,000 U.S. government webpages were scrubbed from the archive, part of what researchers now describe as a “growing purge” of inconvenient or politically sensitive historical records. As a result, several of the archival links included in this article are, at the time of writing, no longer accessible. However, I’ve chosen to keep them visible to preserve the original structure and flow of the piece—if nothing else, as a quiet reminder of how fragile our collective memory has become. A number of the following links now seem to be dead, and that’s all happened since I began writing this in around April.
Returning to the article, please note that several of the provided links are currently inaccessible.
Here are two examples that illustrate how online news stories can be substantially altered after publication — sometimes with no correction note at all.
Archived Truths vs. Present Narratives: A Tale of Two Articles (Updated with Working and Verifiable Links):
Let’s take a breath and remind ourselves: the internet never forgets—unless someone pays it to. Or unless it just forgets out of sheer algorithmic incompetence. Or unless forgetting becomes profitable. Welcome to the world where “past events” are more like open-source fanfiction than fixed truths.
Below are (were) two working, verifiable examples that illustrate how online news stories can be substantially altered after publication—sometimes without a correction note, and sometimes altering the narrative so subtly that most people will never notice unless they’re actively watching the ground shift beneath their feet.
Example 1: The Brooklyn Bridge, Protesters, and the Shape-Shifting Narrative:
Back in October 2011, The New York Times reported on the arrest of over 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge. The original version of the story appeared to suggest that the police had allowed the protesters onto the bridge, creating the impression that arrests may have been a setup or at least a bait-and-switch. But in a version later posted on the same article URL, that tone subtly shifts: now, it reads as if the protesters defied police warnings and marched themselves into arrest, changing the perceived blame entirely.
This isn't just semantics—this is reputational rewriting. The original version of the article, as archived, is no longer directly accessible through The New York Times' website. But thanks to the brilliant (and woefully underused) tool NewsDiffs, we can view what changed, line by line.
Check for yourself: EDIT: You possibly can’t anymore (for the reasons I’ve mentioned above).
Archived version with changes documented:
NewsDiffs record of alterations:
Don’t take my word for it. Go look at the line-by-line changes yourself and ask whether that feels like an honest update or a narrative calibration.
Example 2: Biden’s Quote on Trump’s Potential 2024 Victory—Now You See It, Now You Don’t:
The New York Times again—what can I say, they’re prolific in version control—published a piece in May 2023 quoting President Biden warning that a Trump victory in 2024 "could mean the end of American democracy." The archived version captured this quite starkly. But a later live version of the same article had toned it down, omitting the more dramatic language entirely and replacing it with a far more cautious paraphrasing.
Here's the original archived version:
And here’s the current live version (as of this writing):
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/us/politics/biden-trump-democracy.html
The change isn’t massive in word count—but in tone, it’s a shift from “clear and alarming statement” to “vague political apprehension.” Again, no visible correction note on the page.
Don’t take my word for it. Compare them yourself. Read the archived, read the current, and ask why the changes weren’t flagged — or why they happened at all.
Trump 2.0 and the Acceleration of Memory Management.
Donald Trump’s second term, barely a year in, has already witnessed state and federal agencies revisiting “critical race theory” in textbooks, pressuring libraries to remove books, and even investigating schools for “historical bias” against America. The Department of Education, under the ironically Orwellian “Patriot Curriculum Initiative,” is encouraging states to adopt guidelines limiting discussions of slavery, indigenous genocide, and civil rights struggles in school curricula.
In Florida and Texas, books including The Bluest Eye, Gender Queer, and Stamped from the Beginning have been removed from public and school libraries—not just physically, but digitally via e-reader access services like OverDrive and Libby.
Under this administration, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has floated a “Disinformation Registry” proposal, which would flag and filter online news sources that contradict government-endorsed narratives. Critics argue this is a de facto mechanism for soft censorship—one that leaves no fingerprints.
Big Tech: Your Friendly Neighbourhood Thought Police.
Let’s not pretend tech giants are reluctant participants. Google and Apple routinely remove entire apps from their stores due to vague “policy violations.” Twitter (X), now a lawless and heavily manipulated engagement farm under Musk, shadowbans topics while amplifying government-endorsed trends—particularly around foreign policy and elections.
YouTube has removed videos containing clips of political speeches, protest footage, or even satire under the guise of “misinformation” or “harmful content.” In one noted case, an academic discussion about the Armenian genocide was demonetised and algorithmically down-ranked because it “violated community guidelines.”
And remember when Spotify quietly pulled dozens of songs from its catalogue over politically sensitive lyrics? The tracks, many of them anti-war, pro-environment, or tied to protest movements, were removed without fanfare or explanation—just gone.
The Decline of the Physical Artifact: Why It All Matters More Now.
In Orwell’s London, the only records that matter are those controlled by the Party. The same is now true for our increasingly cloud-only reality. As more of our media, knowledge, and culture exists solely on digital platforms—many controlled by five or six mega-corporations—our grip on truth weakens. CDs, DVDs, physical books, academic journals, newspapers—they're disappearing. Libraries are digitising collections and destroying the paper copies.
And when Amazon or Apple decides to “recall” a book you own? They can and have. In a now-legendary irony, Amazon in 2009 deleted Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindles without warning due to a rights dispute. No satire necessary.
What Comes Next: Faster, Quieter, and More “Personalised” Erasure.
As generative AI enters the mainstream, expect the rewrite to speed up. AI will soon “improve” old books for readability. It will “enhance” films for sensitivity. It will “update” news archives to ensure alignment with modern terminology. Already, Microsoft Word has started suggesting gender-neutral edits. Adobe Firefly and other AI visual tools now warn against generating politically “sensitive” content.
Meanwhile, users will see ever more tightly curated feeds—algorithmically filtered for emotional comfort and ideological fit. As Orwell put it, “The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
Conclusion: Own the Book. Burn the Cloud.
The Ministry of Truth is not coming. It’s here. It wears the smiling mask of convenience and customisation. It tells you your files are “backed up,” your news is “personalised,” your content is “safe.” What it doesn’t tell you is that everything you see is permissioned, modifiable, and potentially temporary.
In Orwell’s world, truth was what the Party said it was. In ours, it’s whatever still exists on a server you don’t control.
So, buy the book. Burn the cloud. Because one day soon, your favourite film may not end the same way. And when you complain, someone will smugly reply, “It never did.”
References & Further Reading:NewsDiffs – Tracking Changes in News Articles:
Description: NewsDiffs is a tool that records changes to news organisations' websites, allowing users to track how articles evolve over time.
URL: https://www.newsdiffs.org/about/NewsDiffs – Browse Changes
Description: A directory to browse changes in articles from major news outlets, including The New York Times.
URL: https://www.newsdiffs.org/browse/
Wikipedia – Timeline of Occupy Wall Street
Description: A chronological account of events during the Occupy Wall Street movement, including the Brooklyn Bridge protest.
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Occupy_Wall_Street
Wikipedia – NewsDiffs
Description: An overview of the NewsDiffs project, its history, and its role in tracking changes in online news articles.
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsDiffs
Politico – NYT Editorial Board Calls on Biden to Drop Out
Description: An article discussing The New York Times editorial board's call for President Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race.
URL: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/28/nyt-editorial-board-biden-debate-00165908
The Guardian – American Media Urges Biden to Quit
Description: Coverage of major media outlets, including The New York Times, urging President Biden to step aside following a debate performance.
Business Insider – NYT Editorial Board Says Biden Has 'Put the Country at Risk'
Description: An article highlighting The New York Times editorial board's concerns over President Biden's decision to remain in the 2024 race.
New York Post – NYT Calls on Biden to Drop Out of 2024 Race
Description: Reporting on The New York Times editorial board's statement that President Biden should withdraw from the 2024 presidential race.
The New Yorker – A.G. Sulzberger on the Battles Within and Against The New York Times
Description: An interview with The New York Times publisher discussing internal and external challenges faced by the newspaper.
The Executive Order That Was Meant to Protect Free Speech, But Ended Up Gagging It
In a bold and unmistakably presidential gesture, President Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term, supposedly aimed at protecting free speech in America. The order’s full title is a mouthful: “Executive Order to Prevent the Government from Restricting Free Speech”
What an awesome article. So on point it ain't funny, James!!!!
And let me add, I've noticed that they've gone back to old movies and drawn chemtrails into the skies. Imagine that. I had the original version, but when I watched this particular movie online, there were the lines. I have been in this realm for 74 years. Growing up I saw white puffy clouds that I would attempt to discern shapes, like faces and animals.
So yeah, while they take stuff out, they put stuff in as well.
They've been actively re-writing history, right before our eyes. Once the elders of this generation leave this realm, who will be left to tell the "true" story because they were there when it happened? Sometimes I hear myself say out loud, that ain't what happened, I know what happened because I was there "when" it happened!! Moving forward, folks won't be able to verify fact from fiction, and like you said, with AI, it's really going to be hard.
I don't know if you've ever heard of James Corbett, but he did a really nice piece called "The Library of Alexandria is on Fire" https://corbettreport.com/episode-384-the-library-of-alexandria-is-on-fire/
Not to mention, the future generations won't even be able to read their grandparents handwriting as they are not even teaching cursive in schools anymore.
As an archivist myself, it hits hard. I too have gone the route of clicking on a link to an article and finding it not there anymore. I have a habit from way back, of saving, I used to print out every article I thought was important to save. Now, I download the website, or copy the article and save it. I won't tell you how many external hard-drives I have. In fact, I prefer saving there instead of my computer just in case my computer gets wonky.
So yeah, we are in an Information War. And if we don't save it, especially references to our posts, it may not be there when we go back to look for it.
This was a really good article, worth the save and worth the cross-post, thanks James, you kicked it out of the park with this one.
These are terrific points, and absolutely need our attention
In a way this is an example of ‘what’s old is new’.
As a kid I watched films on television which had been edited for family viewing, for timing, and often for political reasons. Airlines have always done this. And the Reader’s Digest was really an early adaptor of the manipulation of ideas.
Today with streaming, algorithmic interference and AI, there may no longer be such a thing as an “original version”.