Twitter’s imminent collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history

The founder of open-source investigators Bellingcat, who helped bring the perpetrators of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to justice, says that the social networking site has become a kind of aggregation of information A lot of the stuff you see from Ukraine comes from Telegram channels that other people are following. A real-time news feed of relevant information from both massive organizations and small, independent voices has made it easier to categorize and consume content. It would be felt very much.

It's not a new problem that huge volumes of information disappear from the internet. The ability to locate alleged crimes against humanity in Syria was harmed by the deletion of accounts on the video sharing website. It realized that it played an important part in the history of the country.

"I don't think that will happen with Musk." After mass layoffs, no longer has a communication team for the social networking site.

Researchers are not the only ones who are worried. The US public agencies are concerned about the loss of their verified status, which highlights the fact that a lot of official statements by governments and public bodies are now made on social media. There is no indication that the records of government agencies have ever been preserved.

Many users have taken it upon themselves to back up their data, while the Internet Archive can be used to permanently store snapshots ofTwitter's webpages in a more reliable place Both methods have their own issues, one of which is that multimedia often isn't stored alongside such methods of archive, something that would impact the vast number of accounts posting images and videos from Iran's revolution. If it's not already been preserved on the internet, you may have a hard time finding it.

It is not an ideal solution for users to rely on third-party services, such as Thread Reader, as an archive tool. There's no reason to think that the content will stay there forever, especially since the companies behind those services are almost certainly smaller and more nomadic than the ones behind the social networking site.

Kilbride wants to know if Musk would pull the plug on the social network if it went under. He says that a managed, structured close down to the service would be preferable to the chaos we have now.

Thomas doesn’t have a good solution to the problem, and like much of Twitter at present, the outlook isn’t exactly rosy, she says. “We're going to lose such a lot of digital history if Twitter goes kaput without warning.”