Melania no more:
why did Donald Trump take down his wife's website?
MelaniaTrump.com has
disappeared, and a kerfuffle over a college degree may be to blame.
But experts say it could amplify what they hope will remain unseen
Dan Tynan in San
Francisco
Friday 29 July 2016
12.00 BST
Donald Trump is
notorious for making controversial statements that set the internet
on fire. But the relatively mild kerfuffle about whether his wife
actually received a college degree appears to be something the Trumps
would rather not see broadcast across the web.
Melania Trump’s
personal and professional site, the Huffington Post reported on
Wednesday, has disappeared. A search of Google’s cache reveals that
sometime after 22 July, MelaniaTrump.com was redirected to Trump.com,
the official site for the Trump Organization.
Speculation
immediately centered on a claim made on Ms Trump’s online biography
that she obtained “a degree in design and architecture at
University in Slovenia” shortly before embarking on her modeling
career.
An an unauthorized
biography of Ms Trump, published in February, claims the prospective
first lady left the university after a year without obtaining her
degree. Critics have accused the Trump campaign of deleting the site
in order to hide her biography.
An image posted to
Melania’s Twitter account earlier today states: “The website in
question was created in 2012 and it has been removed because it does
not accurately reflect my current business and professional
interests.”
The tweet was an
unusual one for Mrs Trump, who rarely posts to that account and
usually only with photos. The Trump campaign did not respond to
requests for comment.
Copies of Melania
Trump’s biography page containing the controversial claim were
still visible on the Internet Archive at the time of writing.
However, there are also inexplicable gaps in the archive’s record.
After 14 March 2013, for example, the MelaniaTrump.com home page is
no longer visible.
Mark Graham,
director of the Archive’s Wayback Machine, said “there are
various technical factors … that can affect the quality of both the
capture and replay of web pages.” He added no one from the Trump
campaign contacted the archive to request the pages be removed.
As a nominee for
the presidency, the only way to control your online reputation is
through your statements and actions
Rich Matta, CEO
of ReputationDefender
According to the
domain registration records, MelaniaTrump.com was registered in April
2004 and existed for more than a year as a parody/squatter account
consisting of two sentences: “MelaniaTrump.com For Sale @ the
bargain price of 1 Million Dollars! Cmon Donald Trump of apprentice,
you can afford it!”
Sometime between
December 2005 and March 2006, it passed into the control of the Trump
organization and served as Mrs Trump’s personal site.
This is not the
first time Trumps have attempted to stuff things down the memory
hole. The Politwoops site, which archives tweets deleted by US
politicians, has an entire page devoted to things The Donald tried to
unsay, many of them entirely innocuous.
Nor is Trump is the
only politician to allegedly attempt to scrub things from the web
that might be considered damaging to one’s reputation.
In 2013, the UK’s
Conservative party was accused of purging the party’s website of
content published between 2000 and 2010, allegedly to remove evidence
of unfulfilled campaign promises. It also ensured Internet Archive
had not indexed the pages. One of the deleted pages detailed a speech
that David Cameron, then prime minster, made at Google in which he
said that “political leaders will have to learn to let go of the
information that we have guarded so jealously”.
Multiple US
politicians, including current vice-president Joe Biden and
Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence, have been caught
editing their own Wikipedia entries to suppress unflattering
information. Pence allegedly edited his page to remove a reference to
a former job as a conservative talk radio host, and adding awards,
senior job roles and glowing summaries of his political career.
Members of British parliament have been similarly snagged.
If the Trumps were
attempting to hide this information, they went about it the wrong
way, says Aaron Minc, an internet defamation attorney who specializes
in removing things from the net. If Trump really wanted to remove
this information, he would have deleted the site before having it
redirect to Trump.com, says Minc, and then notified Google to remove
it from its search engine cache.
“There are ways to
permanently delete things from the net, but you have to act quickly
and do the right things, especially if you’re under public
scrutiny,” he says. To keep pages out of the Internet Archive,
website owners can add a file to their site’s main directory called
Robots.txt containing the word “disallow”, says Graham. This will
prevent the archive’s bots from crawling the site’s pages.
Rich Matta, CEO of
ReputationDefender, says there isn’t much a public figure such as
Trump can do besides change the behavior that creates the negative
publicity in the first place.
“We have worked
with some individuals that have similarly massive public profiles as
Donald Trump and that have a penchant for making controversial
statements,” says Matta. “But when you reach the level of intense
scrutiny of a major party nominee for the presidency, the only
realistic way to control your online reputation is through your own
statements and actions.”
He adds that one of
the worst things you can do is try to remove things after the fact,
which can make the negative information spread further and faster –
a phenomenon commonly known as the “Streisand effect”.
The best thing Trump
could do is create more positive content that will keep the negative
stuff from showing up higher in search results, says attorney Bennet
Kelley, founder of the Internet Law Center. “Stop being so
belligerent and intolerant, and promote stuff that people like rather
than attacking others,” he said.
“In other words,
behave like a grownup.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário