The sheer volume of posts on Twitter make it particularly difficult to archive. It is difficult to scrape accounts for content over time, particularly those that are private. The archive of Twitter may look quite different from the online version – many tools for downloading tweets do not save media included with them, or replies. “Most companies do not consider their own mortality in their code or engineering design.” “This reveals a difficult problem on a cultural, engineering and cost level,” Scott said. But many platforms do not make saving content easy in the event of their collapse, and Twitter is no exception, said Jason Scott, a free-range archivist at the Internet Archive who has worked to archive parts of Twitter over the last 15 years. It has archived more than 625bn web pages – including a number of tweets. The Internet Archive, a non-profit founded in 1996, is the largest public web archive and offers publicly available tools to upload and save content online. “It would be heartbreaking for his account to just disappear.” “One of my closest friends passed away last year, when I’m having a bad day I still go and find him on Twitter and laugh at his sarcastic tweets,” another said. “Is it possible to download someone else’s archive? My sister’s tweets are still posted from six years ago and I reread them when I miss her” one user wrote. Activists and media outlets have built their own tracking systems, with “Politiwoops” – a service from ProPublica that tracks deleted tweets from public officials – and PolitiTweet, which aims to “keep the powerful accountable” by monitoring and archiving tweets from celebrities, politicians and public figures.īut what about the average Twitter user, whose posts have not been deemed of interest by anyone but those who know them? Many users have tweeted in recent days that they are seeking to archive tweets from loved ones who have passed away. The National Archives and Records Administration preserves the content of all federal government Twitter accounts, according to a spokesman from the Library of Congress. Tweets from influential accounts are more likely to be saved. It now saves Twitter content “on a selective basis”.
There have been a number of efforts to salvage posts on Twitter throughout its 16 years of existence: the Library of Congress began archiving all tweets in 2007, but halted the process in 2017 due to the growing scale of the platform. “If there’s something you care about on Twitter, now’s the time to become like a temporary expert in digital archiving measures,” said Caroline Sinders, an artificial intelligence researcher and founder of human rights lab Convocation Research and Design.ĭigital archiving – the process of preserving online content for future use – has expanded steadily since the launch of the internet, but still exists in a patchwork, decentralized framework.
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