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Big Brother Conservatives fail to hide the past

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Cameron

Yesterday we reported on the Conservative Party shunning their responsibility of being held to account by deleting speeches made by party officials and press releases over a 10 year period from 2000.

These include promises made the Prime Minister David Cameron before forming the coalition government. A Computer Weekly blog brought the media’s attention to the deletion. The party press office said it was to keep their website up to date and help voters find the party members’ most recent statements. Computer Weekly mentioned the deletion also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google, which Cameron and Osborne championed in the “open source politics”. The blog says ‘Sometime after 5 October, when Computer Weekly last took a snapshot of a Conservative speech from the Internet Archive, the Tory speech and news archive was eradicated.’ This was done by placing a robot blocker which effectively forced search engines and the Internet Archive not to keep a record of the Conservative Party web archive. The deletion hides the Conservative speeches in a secretive corner of the internet like those that shelter the military, secret services, gangsters and paedophiles.

Sheila Gilmore, Labour MP for Edinburgh East described the Conservatives’ website changes as a “cynical stunt” saying “it will take more than David Cameron pressing delete to make people forget about his broken promises”.

For the pages removed Internet Archive reported: “Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt”.

By Aaditya Kaza

Image courtesy of Department for International Development


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