Twitter Round Up

If Twitter goes down in flames, what happens to its historically important collection of tweets?

fab23 writes:

https://walledculture.org/if-twitter-goes-down-in-flames-what-happens-to-its-huge-and-historically-important-collection-of-tweets/

This blog has just written about the likely loss of a very particular kind of culture - K-pop live streams. Culture is culture, and a loss is a loss. But potentially we are facing the disappearance of a cultural resource that is indisputably more important. I'm talking about Twitter, and its vast store of tweets that have been written over the last 16 years of its existence.

We have rather taken Twitter and its key role in modern culture and public discourse for granted. But the recent purchase of the company by Elon Musk, and his idiosyncratic decisions since doing so, have (a) raised the possibility that Twitter will go bankrupt, as Musk himself has allegedly said, and (b) made people realise how much of value would be lost if that happens.

There is no ongoing independent backup of Twitter. There was to begin with: the US Library of Congress (LoC) signed an agreement allowing it to create a complete Twitter Archive for a while. That ran for 12 years, during which time billions of tweets were collected. As an update on the Twitter Archive explained in 2017, the decision not to collect everything thereafter was taken because of the dramatic increase in the number of tweets; the fact that the Library of Congress only received text, but many tweets were more visual than textual; and the increase in potential tweet length from 140 to 280 characters. The LoC also noted that its partial collection already "documents the rise of an important social media platform", and that in any case, it does not aim to "collect comprehensively". As a result, it started adding tweets on a more selective basis.

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