Reddit partially blocked the Internet Archive’s access to its materials after discovering that companies that are prohibited from collecting data directly from the platform are obtaining it through the Wayback Machine archive.
Reddit partially blocked the Internet Archive’s access to its materials after discovering that companies that are prohibited from collecting data directly from the platform are obtaining it through the Wayback Machine archive.
According to Ars Technica, the Wayback Machine previously stored Reddit pages, comments, and user profiles, but will now only archive snapshots of the main page. This means the service will no longer act as a «backup» for restoring deleted posts or investigating activity in individual communities.
Reddit spokesperson Tim Ratschmidt confirmed that the platform’s policy was violated when AI developers used archives to collect data without permission. The company is demanding that the Internet Archive implement technical restrictions that prevent such abuse and ensure privacy, including removing content from archives that has been removed by users.
The Internet Archive has not officially announced whether it is ready for the changes, but Wayback Machine director Mark Graham noted that the organization «has a long-standing partnership» with Reddit and is in talks to lift the restrictions.
Experts believe that Reddit’s decision may not only be about protecting privacy, but also about money: the company has already sold the rights to use its data to OpenAI and Google (the contract with Google is estimated at $60 million) and plans to earn over $200 million from similar deals over three years.
As a reminder, we also published an article about how the social network Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, claiming that it used its content to train its AI models without permission.
