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Parliament adopts Wayback plug-in as official record of past campaign promises
Lawmakers have ordered all campaign pledges to be verified against historical web captures, complete with a 0-100 Consistency Index and a special "Manifesto Integrity Mode" for election season websites.
Parliament on Thursday voted 438-7 to designate the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine browser plug-in as the “authoritative technical record” of all past campaign promises, making archived web pages legally superior to human recollection, handwritten notes and televised interviews.
“Testing by Parliament’s IT department found that the plug-in surfaced at least one conflicting archived statement for 96.4% of campaign webpages, with some long-serving members triggering more than 1,100 “promise variance alerts” per minute during debate.”
Under the new statute, any statement made in an election context will be considered binding only in the form in which it appeared online at the time, as captured by the Wayback Machine, according to the 312-page implementing guidance.
The law requires all sitting and prospective members to install the Wayback plug-in on their official browsers, which will now display a mandatory side panel comparing current claims with earlier versions of party websites, social posts and digital manifestos.
Testing by Parliament’s IT department found that the plug-in surfaced at least one conflicting archived statement for 96.4% of campaign webpages, with some long-serving members triggering more than 1,100 “promise variance alerts” per minute during debate.
A spokesperson for the Internet Archive said the organization had not anticipated its tool being used as a quasi-constitutional instrument, but confirmed that a special “Manifesto Integrity Mode” had been developed at Parliament’s request to lock campaign pages against deletion while explicitly allowing “routine cosmetic dishonesty” such as font changes.
Web publishers will be required to embed a new “Pledge Header” meta-tag in all campaign-related pages by 2027, enabling browser users to hover over any slogan and see a timeline of edits, removals and re-phrasings rated on a 0-100 “Consistency Index,” according to an internal memo seen by reporters.
Analysts at Deloitte estimated that compliance with the legislation could generate a €4.8 billion “promise management” industry by 2030, including consulting services to help parties restructure pledges into shorter, more archivable sentences that can be more easily reinterpreted without triggering an automatic contradiction flag.
Opposition parties have already begun lobbying for a five-year “contextual grace period,” arguing that voters should not be distracted by web captures from what one senior strategist described as “the experimental policy phase of every campaign,” while government ministers have privately requested an option to blur promises made after midnight.
Parliament’s standards committee will review the first full year of plug-in data in 2026, with an option to introduce automated sanctions if the national average Promise Fulfilment Ratio remains below the provisional threshold of 11.3%, or to extend coverage to non-political claims such as pre-launch tech product announcements if the system is deemed a success.
