If you are thinking that you might have to move to Canada if things go really bad under President Trump, you’re not alone. The Internet Archive, a digital library devoted to keeping alive public websites that go defunct, has the same concerns. As the site announced in a blog post, “On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change. It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible.”
The worry is that a Trump administration might want to ban pages hosting the ISIS propaganda magazine Dabiq, whose contents are maintained on the Internet Archive (working in conjunction with an anti-extremist group called the Clarion Project). To guard against this possibility, the Internet Archive is soliciting tax-deductible donations to create a mirror site in Canada. Trump or no Trump, given the tens of millions of pages the Internet Archives is currently preserving, several back-up sites might be in order just for the sake of cultural preservation.