In November 2013,there was a bit of a fuss about the UK Conservative party removing their speeches from their website. Not-for-profit social enterprise mySociety have found all speeches from the Conservative party, as well as the Labour party, and put them all online.
Was it a sinister rewriting of history, or a simple spring clean of elderly content? Well, that depends who you believe – but here at mySociety, we do think that you should be able to hold political parties to account for promises they made in the past.
Not only that, but we happen to have a splendid tool for publishing the spoken word: SayIt.
So we thought we’d track down that missing content and put it online for anyone to search and browse. And because we are a wholly non-partisan organisation, we did the same for Labour.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 23 2014, @11:27PM
Somehow taking all these old speeches and handing them over to a private company seems sort of wrong headed.
Why not host them on public sites and let Bing and Google index them for you?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by n1 on Wednesday September 24 2014, @01:20PM
The private company is the one that appears to have taken the initiative to make the information available. The parties themselves would seem to prefer that past promises remained buried, or these speeches would still be archived on the party websites.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:22PM
There ain't no such thing as a "memory hole" on the Internet. A lot of folks would like there to be, but there simply isn't one, because chances are very very good that somebody, somewhere, has the data.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.