Fearing censorship under Trump, the Internet Archive took the extraordinary step of building a mirror server in Canada to protect public data from deletion or manipulation.
In late 2016, as Donald Trump prepared to enter the White House, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit best known for its Wayback Machine—did something unprecedented: it announced plans to build a full mirror of its archive in Canada.
Why? Because archivists, librarians, and digital preservationists feared that Trump’s administration might erase or alter massive swaths of public data, including environmental and scientific records. In a segment from Democracy Now!, Archive founder Brewster Kahle said plainly that the goal was to preserve “a record of what’s on the web before it disappears.”
The move wasn’t about partisan politics—it was about digital survival.
Over the years, Trump has consistently shown an adversarial relationship with the truth and with the press. During his 2016 campaign, he banned major outlets like The Washington Post from events. He regularly attacked journalists, threatened libel law changes, and labeled critical reporting as “fake news.” The message was clear: negative coverage would not be tolerated.
What made the Internet Archive’s decision so stark was that it came not from activists or political rivals, but from a respected, nonpartisan institution dedicated to transparency and open access. Their fear wasn’t theoretical—it was rooted in Trump’s repeated statements about dismantling federal agencies, defunding scientific research, and controlling the flow of information.
By mirroring its servers across borders, the Internet Archive essentially created a digital insurance policy against potential authoritarian behavior. It wasn’t just a safeguard for U.S. public records—it was a statement to the world: information should outlive administrations.
And while the Archive may be a quiet presence in the fight for truth, its choice to relocate data outside U.S. borders remains one of the clearest warnings of what unchecked power and information control can threaten in a democracy.
