May 19, 2026
The House of Mouse strikes back
Disney Erased FiveThirtyEight
Disney didn’t just shut FiveThirtyEight — fans say it practically vanished overnight
TLDR: Disney appears to have erased FiveThirtyEight’s old site, sending readers to ABC News and sparking outrage over lost journalism and the fragility of the web. In the comments, people blamed corporate neglect, mocked Disney with Star Wars jokes, and reopened old political fights about the site’s coverage.
The internet had a full-on meltdown after former FiveThirtyEight boss Nate Silver revealed that Disney appears to have wiped the once-famous data news site from the web, with old links now dumping readers onto ABC News instead. For longtime readers, this wasn’t just a broken website story — it felt like watching a whole chunk of media history get tossed in the trash. Silver says years of reporting, analysis, and number-crunching were effectively erased, and commenters were equal parts furious, cynical, and darkly amused.
The hottest reactions were all over the map. Some commenters saw the deletion as classic big-company neglect, with one arguing that Disney should know better if it wants to be seen as a good home for acquired brands. Others zoomed out into a broader panic about “link rot,” the slow death of old web pages, saying this is a warning that the internet forgets way more than people think. And then came the spicy political shots: one skeptic claimed FiveThirtyEight’s mistakes always seemed to “lean to one side,” dragging the site’s election coverage back into the comments war.
Of course, the thread also brought the jokes. The shortest and perhaps most brutal line compared it to Star Wars: “It’s what happened to Star Wars. Figures.” Ouch. Add in gripes about revolving-door corporate leadership killing old projects, and the vibe was clear: readers weren’t just mourning a website — they were roasting the entire media machine that let it disappear.
Key Points
- •The article says Disney-era FiveThirtyEight pages now redirect to ABC News’s homepage, making the original site archive unavailable at those URLs.
- •ABC News had not made a public comment cited by the author and declined to comment to The New York Times, which reported on the disappearance.
- •The article connects FiveThirtyEight’s disappearance to broader web “link rot,” citing a Pew study that found nearly 40% of decade-old links were broken and an ahrefs study showing roughly two-thirds attrition after 11 years.
- •The author says archived FiveThirtyEight content remains accessible for now via the Internet Archive, while selected new election, polling, and sports models are being rebuilt at Silver Bulletin.
- •The article estimates that FiveThirtyEight produced about 20 stories per week over roughly 10 Disney-era years, at about 20 hours per story, totaling around 200,000 person-hours of work.