TheRevolutionWillNotBeArchived11% of the Social Media About the Egyptian Revolution Has Been Lost In One Year.

HanyM. SalahEldeen andMichael L. Nelson

hany@cs.odu.edu, mln@cs.odu.edu

How Long Do the Links We Share Last?If twitter is the ”first draft of history”, then we should be doing a better job of preserving it. For the oneyear anniversary of the Egyptian revolution (2012) we revisited a sample of the shared social media contentand found nearly 11% missing from the current web, and only 20% available in public web archives. Spurredby this, we sampled tweets for five other culturally imporant events from 2009–2012 and found similar ratesfor archiving and loss.

Persistent Content Missing Content

https://twitter.com/aishes/status/32485352102952960

https://twitter.com/omar chaaban/status/32203697597452289

Dataset Collection

Stage 1: Egyptian Revolution

• 3 Storify Entries:(26 Videos, 179 Images, 17 Links).

• IamJan25.com,(2928 Images; 2387 Videos).

• Tweets From Tahrir book(1118 tweets, 23 Embedded Images).

Stage 2: Other Historic Events

• Michael Jackson’s Death (June 2009): 2293 Tweets

• Iran Elections (July 2009): 3429 Tweets

• H1N1 Virus (Sep 2009): 5517 Tweets

• Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize (Oct 2009): 1118 Tweets

• Syrian Uprising (Mar 2012): 1955 Tweets

Event Based Analysis

Results

ConclusionAfter the first year, nearly 11% of the content is lost. After that nearly 7.3% of the content posted in socialmedia is lost annually.

References1- Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?Hany M. SalahEldeen and Michael L. Nelson. TPDL2012.