McSpotlight is what happens when a mid-1990s activist network looks at a multinational corporation, a giant libel trial, and the new World Wide Web and decides to upload everything.
Visit McSpotlight’s McLibel archive
The site launched on February 16, 1996. Its own launch history says volunteers spent roughly three months scanning documents and coordinating internationally before the pages went live in London, Chicago, Helsinki, and Auckland.
According to McSpotlight’s FAQ, the first version already contained about 1,300 files. By the end of the trial, the site says it had grown to roughly 21,000 files.
That scale matters.
This was not a campaign homepage
The McLibel case involved McDonald’s, Helen Steel, and Dave Morris, two London activists who defended themselves against the company’s libel action.
McSpotlight turned the dispute into a public document archive: witness statements, scientific reports, court material, media coverage, campaign arguments, interviews, audio, video, and background information about the company and the issues being argued in court.
The site’s presentation is openly activist rather than neutral, and it should be read that way. But the archive is valuable precisely because it preserves the campaign’s evidence, language, tactics, and contemporary framing instead of reducing the case to a paragraph written decades later.
Its surviving McLibel page also records later legal outcomes. The original English case produced findings that went both ways: the defendants failed to prove some allegations and were found to have libelled McDonald’s, while the judge also made findings critical of company practices. Steel and Morris later took the British government to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that their rights to a fair trial and freedom of expression had been violated.
The more interesting web-history point is the mechanism.
In 1996, a political campaign could suddenly bypass newspaper space limits and put thousands of source documents in front of anyone with a modem.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes old advocacy sites because they preserve arguments in the form they were actually made, complete with the documents their authors wanted readers to inspect.
McSpotlight did not just publish a position.
It built a searchable pile of ammunition.