The digital equivalent of bookburning:
Since President Trump was sworn into office, almost three thousand datasets have disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S. government’s repository of open data.
According to 404 Media, online archivist communities discovered since Trump took office on Jan. 21, the number of datasets on Data.gov has decreased to 305,564 from 307,854 datasets. Screenshots of Data.gov’s homepage archived in the Wayback Machine show the number of datasets one day before (Jan. 20) and nine days after (Jan. 30) the Trump administration began.
Having worked with data.gov extensively, this may be a huge nothing burger. The number of datasets fluctuates constantly, and ultimately the vast majority of those are just links to specific agencies. If you’re lucky, they link the to actual data, but most of the time the link just goes to a landing page for the team that collected the data.
The project stopped running years ago, or I’d pull actual statistics on what was removed or if there’s a shared keyword.
But running and syndicating articles based on two screenshots is not particularly useful. At least send in a FOIA request to find out which ones were removed.