Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?
This study addresses the problem of digital preservation for social media users and archivists, highlighting significant resource loss over time, but it is incremental as it quantifies existing concerns without introducing new methods.
The paper investigated the loss of resources shared on social media over time, finding that about 11% are lost after one year and 27% after two and a half years, with a linear trend predicting a daily loss of 0.02% after the first year.
Social media content has grown exponentially in the recent years and the role of social media has evolved from just narrating life events to actually shaping them. In this paper we explore how many resources shared in social media are still available on the live web or in public web archives. By analyzing six different event-centric datasets of resources shared in social media in the period from June 2009 to March 2012, we found about 11% lost and 20% archived after just a year and an average of 27% lost and 41% archived after two and a half years. Furthermore, we found a nearly linear relationship between time of sharing of the resource and the percentage lost, with a slightly less linear relationship between time of sharing and archiving coverage of the resource. From this model we conclude that after the first year of publishing, nearly 11% of shared resources will be lost and after that we will continue to lose 0.02% per day.