Twitter’s Potential Collapse Could Wipe Out Vast Records of Recent Human History

• “The platform has been used to record everything from the Arab Spring to the ongoing war in Ukraine.” ⤴️
• “if Elon Musk tanks the company, these rich seams of media and conversation could be lost forever.” ⤴️
• “his admission to employees in a November 10 call that Twitter could face bankruptcy, it’s a real and present risk.” ⤴️
• “integral to civilization today. It’s a place where people document war crimes, discuss key issues, and break and report on news.” ⤴️
• “It’s where the US raid that would result in Osama bin Laden’s death was first announced. It’s where people get updates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s where news of the downing of flight MH17, a Malaysia Airlines plane that was likely shot down by pro-Russia forces in Ukraine in 2014, first surfaced.” ⤴️
• “It is a living, breathing historical document.” ⤴️
• ““If Twitter was to ‘go in the morning’, let’s say, all of this—all of the firsthand evidence of atrocities or potential war crimes, and all of this potential evidence—would simply disappear,” says Ciaran O’Connor, senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue” ⤴️
• “Information gathered using open-source intelligence, known as OSINT, has been used to support prosecutions for war crimes and acts as a record of events long after the human memory fades.” ⤴️
• “the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company” ⤴️
• “this actually represents an enormous opportunity for future historians—we’ve never had the capacity to capture this much data about any previous era in history,”” ⤴️
• “For eight years, the US Library of Congress took it upon itself to maintain a public record of all tweets, but it stopped in 2018” ⤴️
• “If the Library of Congress can’t do it, that tells you something quite important,”” ⤴️
• “Twitter has become a kind of aggregator of information” ⤴️
• ““A lot of this stuff you see from Ukraine, the footage comes from Telegram channels that other people are following, but they’re sharing it on Twitter.”” ⤴️
• “a real-time news feed of relevant information from both massive organizations and small, independent voices.” ⤴️
• “In 2017, YouTube was accused of harming investigators’ ability to pinpoint alleged crimes against humanity in Syria by permanently deleting accounts that posted videos from Syrian cities.” ⤴️
• “the importance it played as a host of historical information.” ⤴️
• “US public agencies’ concern about the loss of their verified status highlights the fact that lots of official statements by governments and public bodies are now made on Twitter first.” ⤴️
• ““There’s no indication that those formal records of government agencies have ever been archived, or indeed how they’d go about doing that,”” ⤴️
• “multimedia often isn’t stored alongside such methods of archiving tweets—something that would affect the vast numbers of accounts posting images and videos from Iran’s revolution” ⤴️
• ““You may have trouble finding that if it’s not already been preserved in some way somewhere else on the internet,”” ⤴️
• ““We’re going to lose such a lot of digital history if Twitter goes kaput without warning.”” ⤴️
• “The platform has been used to record everything from the Arab Spring to the ongoing war in Ukraine.” ⤴️
• “if Elon Musk tanks the company, these rich seams of media and conversation could be lost forever.” ⤴️
• “his admission to employees in a November 10 call that Twitter could face bankruptcy, it’s a real and present risk.” ⤴️
• “integral to civilization today. It’s a place where people document war crimes, discuss key issues, and break and report on news.” ⤴️
• “It’s where the US raid that would result in Osama bin Laden’s death was first announced. It’s where people get updates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s where news of the downing of flight MH17, a Malaysia Airlines plane that was likely shot down by pro-Russia forces in Ukraine in 2014, first surfaced.” ⤴️
• “It is a living, breathing historical document.” ⤴️
• ““If Twitter was to ‘go in the morning’, let’s say, all of this—all of the firsthand evidence of atrocities or potential war crimes, and all of this potential evidence—would simply disappear,” says Ciaran O’Connor, senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue” ⤴️
• “Information gathered using open-source intelligence, known as OSINT, has been used to support prosecutions for war crimes and acts as a record of events long after the human memory fades.” ⤴️
• “the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company” ⤴️
• “this actually represents an enormous opportunity for future historians—we’ve never had the capacity to capture this much data about any previous era in history,”” ⤴️
• “For eight years, the US Library of Congress took it upon itself to maintain a public record of all tweets, but it stopped in 2018” ⤴️
• “If the Library of Congress can’t do it, that tells you something quite important,”” ⤴️
• “Twitter has become a kind of aggregator of information” ⤴️
• ““A lot of this stuff you see from Ukraine, the footage comes from Telegram channels that other people are following, but they’re sharing it on Twitter.”” ⤴️
• “a real-time news feed of relevant information from both massive organizations and small, independent voices.” ⤴️
• “In 2017, YouTube was accused of harming investigators’ ability to pinpoint alleged crimes against humanity in Syria by permanently deleting accounts that posted videos from Syrian cities.” ⤴️
• “the importance it played as a host of historical information.” ⤴️
• “US public agencies’ concern about the loss of their verified status highlights the fact that lots of official statements by governments and public bodies are now made on Twitter first.” ⤴️
• ““There’s no indication that those formal records of government agencies have ever been archived, or indeed how they’d go about doing that,”” ⤴️
• “multimedia often isn’t stored alongside such methods of archiving tweets—something that would affect the vast numbers of accounts posting images and videos from Iran’s revolution” ⤴️
• ““You may have trouble finding that if it’s not already been preserved in some way somewhere else on the internet,”” ⤴️
• ““We’re going to lose such a lot of digital history if Twitter goes kaput without warning.”” ⤴️