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> At least historians of our era will have terabytes of rumors in Facebook/Twitter to examine. (Or will they?) I'm almost certain they won't. IIRC, Facebook a
by tivert 3y ago
> At least historians of our era will have terabytes of rumors in Facebook/Twitter to examine. (Or will they?)
I'm almost certain they won't. IIRC, Facebook and Twitter are very resistant to scraping. Eventually they'll shut down or pivot, and all their existing data will go poof.
Plus people think about social media differently than newspapers. Newspapers were an open public record, and some effort was always made to archive them (e.g. the local library binding them into books or microfilming them). Social media is this weird amalgam of public and private, that people are more jealously guarding from the public.
- jetrink 3y agoThe Library of Congress has an archive of every tweet from 2006 to 2017. In 2018, they began selectively archiving tweets. I can't find how selective they are exactly, but as far as I can tell, the project is still ongoing. 1. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/ https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-arch...
- anigbrowl 3y agoAPI access and scraping viability has changed significantly since then.
- roenxi 3y agoTo be fair, the importance of those tweets in shaping the public conversation might also die because of that. In the high old days era of the 2010s I could go and read what interesting people were thinking about today on Twitter. Now if I pick a random account I know is active I see what they were saying in 2022 for some reason. They're relying very heavily on their existing network of users if that is not some weird thing that only affects me. I'd assume most readers don't create accounts.