Shining Light On Acronym's Shadow

In the aftermath of the Iowa caucus troubles, many of the organizations that had previously touted their associations with the app's developer, Shadow, quickly distanced themselves, including ACRONYM. Today Shadow's website makes no mention of ACRONYM, yet journalists were able to use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to show that prior to last week's issues, it proudly touted that:

ACRONYM is thrilled to announce the launch of Shadow, a new technology company that will exist under the ACRONYM umbrella and build accessible technological infrastructure and tools to enable campaigns to better harness, integrate and manage data across the platforms and technologies they all use. As part of the launch of Shadow, ACRONYM has acquired Groundbase, a peer-to-peer SMS and CRM tool that helped 75 progressive organizations and campaigns win elections during the 2018 cycle.

GDELT was actually the source of the Wayback Machine's first two captures of the page in question, on April 15, 2019 and July 13, 2019, through a longstanding collaboration with the Internet Archive since 2014 to provide it a livestream of all news and news-linked URLs it monitors worldwide.

The modern web is constantly being rewritten to erase inconvenient truths into the memory hole, so it is exciting to see how GDELT's collaboration with the Archive is able to help preserve critical societally relevant narratives for journalists, scholars and the future citizens of our world.