Fivethirtyeightindex Lets Users Search Thousands of Deleted Fivethirtyeight Articles
The tool restores public access to a decade of data journalism that the site's corporate owner removed without explanation, representing roughly 200,000 hours of reported labor.
Reporting from 1 source: GIGAZINE.
A new site called fivethirtyeightindex allows searching 38,593 past FiveThirtyEight articles and images that were deleted by Disney. The articles, covering polls, politics, economics, and sports from roughly 2013 to 2023, were taken offline after ABC News laid off staff in 2025. The archive draws on the Internet Archive's preserved copies.
FiveThirtyEight was founded in 2008 by Nate Silver as a poll aggregation and analysis site. Disney acquired it via ESPN in 2013, then moved it to ABC News in 2018. After Silver left in 2023, ABC News laid off the FiveThirtyEight staff in 2025 as part of Disney's broader workforce cuts. By May 2026, Silver discovered that older articles had been deleted and links redirected to the ABC News homepage. Former colleague Nathaniel Rakich called the deletion an unnecessary erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge. ABC News has not commented.
Silver estimated that FiveThirtyEight published about 20 articles per week, each requiring roughly 20 hours of work, meaning the deleted archive represents about 200,000 hours of labor. The Internet Archive preserved the content, and the new fivethirtyeightindex site organizes those preserved copies into a searchable database of 38,593 articles and images.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.