A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday and is currently being hosted in Europe.

As we have been following since the beginning of Trump’s second term, websites across the entire federal government have been altered and taken offline under this administration’s war on science, health, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Critical information promoting vaccines, HIV care, reproductive health options including abortion, and trans and gender confirmation healthcare have been purged from the CDC’s live website under Trump. Disease surveillance data about bird flu and other concerns have either been delayed or have stopped being updated entirely. Some deleted pages across the government have at least temporarily been restored thanks to a court order, but the Trump administration has added a note rejecting “gender ideology” to some of them.

“Our goal is to provide a resource that includes the information and data previously available,” the team wrote. “We are committed to providing the previously available webpages and data, from before the potential tampering occurred. Our approach is to be as transparent as possible about our process. We plan to gather archival data and then remove CDC logos and branding, using GitHub to host our code to create the site.”

  • db2@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Good to see people taking “information demands to be free” seriously.

  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    It’s weird living in a world where people are rescuing our past from the Ministry of Information sponsored Memory Hole.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    but many website archives are slow to use and difficult to navigate because things like interactive elements and internal linking can sometimes be wonky.

    Well, at least httrack does the relinking by itself. And i think wget’s mirror option too?

  • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    Aren’t there also a bunch of govt officials making alts on bluesky to try to somewhat anonymously get info out?

  • ivanafterall ☑️@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I was just thinking earlier today: I really, really hope someone is backing up the Library of Congress’ stuff, particularly Chronicling America, which has almost every newspaper issue (searchable by text and much more) from 1756 - 1963. Like archive.org – federal edition, sort of.

    Anyway, given how fascists love to erase history, it’s precisely the kind of thing I could see them targeting. Particularly if you wanted to erase the fact that, oh, I don’t know, your father Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927. That kinda thing.

  • SabinStargem@lemmings.world
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    4 days ago

    I hope California, blue states, and Europe all bankroll this into an official Neo-CDC, free of Yarvin’s hatred and stupidity.

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 days ago

      Europe won’t do a thing with these initiatives, at least not in any official manner (what they can do though is to ensure EU web hosters of this stuff aren’t feeling the pressure). They’ve enough to do restructuring their economy and military, all the while also dealing with war and fascism from the east. They won’t risk Trump having another tamper tantrum, at least not before the EU and its allies are widely decoupled from the US economy.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        They need to actually go into Ukraine before the US takes a more active Russian stance. He’ll talk a lot, but he doesn’t want a war with the EU. Europe needs to move first.

    • eronth@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      They’re either beating it back or delaying it. I hope it’s the former, but I fear it’s the latter.

      • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 days ago

        If they screw shit up too much there are already the nerdiest of nerds working on decentralized wireless networks. They’d be slow is heck, but I heard many people prefer web 1.0 over todays’ bloated crap anyway.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 days ago

    we need to get blue state leaders and researchers to start referring data to it and referencing this instead of the official site.