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
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 c omment.
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.
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.
@realDonaldTrump: “Clinton made a false ad about me where I was imitating a reporter GROVELING after he changed his story. I would NEVER Moch disabled. Shame!”
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.”
