Endalkachew H Chala

Endalkachew H Chala

Media and communication scholar studying digital platforms, journalism, and public communication across multilingual and transnational contexts

Who Will Remember the Digital Public Sphere?

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Much of what we know about the early digital public sphere survives because someone documented it. Journalists reported, activists recorded abuses, researchers collected evidence, and independent organizations preserved material that might otherwise have disappeared.

The web, however, has never been a reliable archive of itself. Websites close, links break, newsrooms reorganize their collections, and social media accounts vanish. Even when information survives, finding it years later can be difficult.

As artificial intelligence reshapes how information is found and consumed, the institutions preserving the web face new pressures. For me, the problem is not abstract. It connects fifteen years of documenting Ethiopia’s digital public sphere with something I rediscovered this month.

A compilation, a trial tracker, and what survived

In 2013, my fellow Zone 9 blogger Zelalem Kibret gathered our first year of Amharic writing into one collection. We knew the blog could be taken down. The compilation was a way to preserve at least that first year as a whole.

After six of my colleagues were arrested in April 2014, I created Trial Tracker to document their cases, report on court proceedings, and keep the public informed over the eighteen months leading to their acquittal. Zelalem’s compilation remains accessible there: Zone 9 Bloggers, First-Year Amharic Writings (PDF). It sits on a free WordPress account I have not maintained in years. Its continued availability owes more to circumstance than to any preservation plan.

Finding those writings again reminded me how fragile digital memory is. Work produced as journalism, advocacy, and real-time documentation has become part of Ethiopia’s historical record. Yet that record is dispersed across personal blogs, neglected websites, institutional reports, and archives with uncertain futures.

While updating my academic CV, I encountered the same problem elsewhere. A 2015 interview with Index on Censorship about the Zone 9 case now sits behind a publisher’s paywall, and the version a reader can open is a reprint on another site that I found only because I remembered it existed. The Freedom House country reports I researched between 2012 and 2015 have moved at least once: the 2012 report lives at one file path, the 2013 and 2015 editions at paths showing they were re-uploaded in 2020, and the 2014 edition is easiest to find on a UN refugee agency mirror. Several broadcast interviews from 2015 and 2016 are gone from the broadcasters’ own sites; a transcript survives on a blog that copied it.

These are not spectacular losses. Much of the material can still be found, if you know where to look. But I was looking for my own work, with my own memory as the index. A researcher ten years from now, reconstructing debates about surveillance or internet shutdowns in 2014, will not have that advantage.

So the question is larger than my reporting: Who will preserve the digital records of communities, movements, and institutions when the websites that first hosted them disappear? And how can we make those records findable, intelligible, and safe to use?

From reporting to research

When I began contributing to Global Voices in 2011, Ethiopia’s online public sphere was emerging amid limited access, censorship, surveillance, and restrictions on independent expression. I reported on political mobilization online, internet disruptions, surveillance, the growing influence of social media, and the risks faced by journalists and bloggers.

The Zone 9 case made those concerns immediate. After six colleagues were arrested in April 2014, Global Voices and others documented developments publicly, as they happened. I contributed an essay on the politics of blogging in Ethiopia, spoke about the Hacking Team revelations involving spyware used against Ethiopian journalists, and helped organize a Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The goal was not only to inform people in the moment. It was to leave a record beyond the news cycle. Digital expression was inseparable from political participation, personal security, and the freedom to communicate.

From 2012 to 2021, I also researched and wrote Ethiopia country reports for Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net. Earlier editions did not name contributors because attribution could create security risks; the 2019 and 2020 editions identify me. This was part of a collective effort to document developments too often overlooked in global debates about technology.

The reporting later informed my research questions. Internet shutdowns became a way to investigate digital sovereignty. Platform moderation raised questions about linguistic inequality and governance. Online political mobilization led me to study fundraising, conflict, and collective action. Reporting identified the questions; research gave me new ways to pursue them.

The problem of digital memory

Digital history is often scattered across incompatible places. A report sits on an organization’s former website. An article survives only in a web archive. A social media post disappears. A dataset remains online but lacks the documentation needed to interpret it.

In Ethiopia, uneven institutional resources, political restrictions, multilingual publishing, and a shortage of organized collections deepen the problem. Yet these materials are essential to understanding how digital communication, surveillance, platform governance, and political participation developed.

Preservation is not simply keeping a file online. It is ensuring that people can find it, understand its context, and assess its reliability years later.

The Internet Archive and a changing web

The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine have made older versions of websites indispensable to journalists, historians, and researchers. But no institution can capture the entire web. The Internet Archive has also faced legal disputes, cybersecurity attacks, technical costs, and restrictions from publishers.

In January 2026, Nieman Lab reported that major publishers—including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co.—had begun blocking Internet Archive crawlers, concerned that AI companies might collect their work through archived copies. By May the count had reached 382 news sites, 342 of them local outlets, including the McClatchy, Advance Local, and Alden Global Capital chains. No publisher had confirmed that an AI company had actually scraped their content from the Wayback Machine. They were acting on the risk.

The tension is real. Publishers have legitimate concerns about unauthorized commercial reuse. But blocking independent archives can also limit our ability to verify earlier claims, trace changes in published information, and investigate the past. Libraries, universities, and news organizations must protect their systems from automated extraction while keeping records accessible to readers and researchers. The effort to protect content can end up making public memory harder to preserve.

When bots become an audience

The web’s economic bargain is changing. Publishers once expected readers to visit the pages where information appeared, supporting subscriptions, advertising, visibility, or engagement. AI-powered search and automated agents can retrieve and summarize that information without sending readers to its source. Cloudflare has described this as the web acquiring a second audience of machines, and Pew Research Center has found that users are less likely to click through to sources when an AI summary appears.

Being accessed is no longer the same as being read, credited, or supported. What happens when machines extract material more frequently than people visit the organizations maintaining it? How should we assess influence when information circulates through AI-generated answers rather than citations or links? And who will fund preservation when the systems using these records do not necessarily sustain their creators? These questions are particularly urgent for small, nonprofit, and independent publishers.

A proposal: a community-governed archive of Ethiopia’s digital history

Large-scale archives remain essential. But they need to be complemented by collections with the context and stewardship that individual communities can provide.

I propose a searchable, community-governed catalogue of Ethiopia’s digital history: reporting, policy documents, research, archival references, and publicly shareable datasets, organized across languages, institutions, subjects, and time periods. Someone reading an early report on internet restrictions should be able to discover later journalism, policy analysis, and scholarship about the same events.

A common point of discovery does not require a single owner or storage location. A shared catalogue could direct readers to copies preserved by trusted repositories, libraries, and archival partners, while retaining authorship, publication dates, source links, version histories, and rights information. The first step could be modest: an open pilot catalogue drawn from materials that I and others already hold, with a clear way for contributors to suggest additions and corrections.

Such a project must have ethical limits. Historical interest alone does not justify exposing sensitive material about activists or vulnerable people. Preservation decisions should consider consent, privacy, safety, and the risk that AI-powered discovery will make obscure information easier to find and misuse. Access should expand without creating new dangers for the people documented.

If you work in journalism, research, libraries, archives, or digital rights and would like to help shape this effort, I welcome your thoughts.

What I have put on the record so far

My work has increasingly included open datasets, reproducibility materials, and research libraries. Some relate directly to Ethiopia; others offer models for how collections might be organized and maintained:

None of these resources, alone or together, constitutes an archive of Ethiopia’s digital history. Their value could grow through connections with other collections and durable institutional support. Moving from individual initiatives to shared infrastructure will take journalists, scholars, librarians, archivists, civil society organizations, and the communities represented in the records. It will also require funding for long-term care, not just initial collection.

What counts as impact

We count academic citations, article readers, website visits, and dataset downloads. These are useful measures, but they cannot fully capture the value of a historical record. A report overlooked at publication may become indispensable years later. An archived page can reveal what an institution once said. A dataset may support questions its creators never imagined. AI makes it more urgent to distinguish information that is consumed from evidence that is preserved.

Ethiopia’s digital public sphere belongs to no single reporter, researcher, or organization. Many people helped shape and document it, often at considerable personal risk. My path from reporting and digital rights work to academic research is one thread in that larger history. The question that matters most to me now is not how often that work will be cited, but whether the evidence behind it will remain accessible, intelligible, and trustworthy.

Publishing leaves a trace. Preservation gives that trace a future.

Sources and resources

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