That's been my nagging fear about them too. Obviously it's not an option they'd want to exercise frequently, but it could be devastating to individual targets.
(ofc this is a risk with the Wayback Machine, who also has a policy for honoring takedown request. But the Internet Archive's board and executives are known people with reputations)
Yes, and archiving as a practice became popular when people noticed that media sites were beginning to edit or delete articles without listing a correction, sometimes after the story had already circulated widely. Previously, editors would usually make a note of such things.
(This is why archives that bypass paywalls are particularly important. I wish we had more options here.)
