Social Media Archiving

Social media archiving encompasses all archival activities aimed at the systematic collection organization preservation and transmission to future generations of text visual video and audio content generated by users on social media platforms. This process requires an interdisciplinary approach that harmonizes traditional archival principles with the needs of the digital age and is critically important for the preservation of cultural heritage formed through online social interaction.

The increasing connectivity of computers through the proliferation of network technologies has gradually led to the formation of a vast ocean of information on a global scale. As a natural consequence of this development people have begun to become components of the electronic network just like computers. In this context social media archiving can be defined as a specialized field of archiving that aims to preserve the digital dimension of collective memory at both individual and institutional levels.

History

The roots of social media archiving lie in internet archiving. In 1996 Brewster Kahle established the Internet Archive the first initiative in this field laying the foundation for accessing archived web pages through a search engine called the Wayback Machine using open-source web archiving software. This early initiative has since evolved into a massive digital collection containing 33 billion web pages 20 million books and texts 4.5 million audio recordings and 4 million videos.

With the emergence of platforms that came to represent the concept of social media whose numbers have steadily increased since the 2000s and are now indispensable elements of the internet the need arose to archive this content. With the widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies the emphasis shifted from searching for information to the sharing of emotions thoughts and ideas and the proliferation of online collaborations. During this period social media began to be directly associated with the term Web 2.0 and the platforms’ two-way interaction transformed users from passive participants into active agents in their relationships with society and the state.

A significant turning point occurred in 2010 when the Library of Congress of the United States entered into a partnership with Twitter to archive the entire platform in order to contribute to the nation’s collective cultural memory. This initiative holds the distinction of being the first comprehensive institutional application in social media archiving. During the same period similar projects were launched in various countries: in China in 2015 social media archiving efforts were initiated and in the United Kingdom in 2011 collaborative projects were implemented with the Internet Memory Foundation.

Technical Structure and Operation

Social media archiving differs significantly from traditional web archiving. While internet archives collect content from websites by mimicking or using an actual web browser social media archives gather content through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This fundamental difference has compelled social media archiving to develop its own methodological approaches.

One of the advantages of the API-based collection method is that it enables certain large-scale collection formats that are impossible or difficult with web crawling. For example with the Twitter API it is possible to capture tweets by tag (hashtag) or keyword. However each social media API is different and therefore requires different software. At the same time APIs and websites can produce different metadata and are often subject to different terms or policies.

One of the most important technical challenges in archiving social media content stems from its dynamic nature. Social media websites are continuously modified and updated while APIs are rarely changed and any modifications are usually announced in advance. Moreover not all social media platforms provide public APIs and in some cases APIs are reserved exclusively for business partners. This situation gives rise to the problem of platform dependency in archival work.

Application Areas

Social media archiving has a very broad range of applications. Within the framework of e-government initiatives the decision by official institutions and organizations to open social media accounts and share official news and informational activities through these channels has created a necessity to archive this content. As seen during the COVID-19 pandemic content shared by official institutions and organizations to inform the public with accurate information helps to strengthen citizens’ trust in the state and provides a more effective e-government experience.

In the field of academic research social media archives provide researchers with unique data sources for sociological studies linguistic research psychological investigations and historical studies. Emotions and thoughts expressed through millions of blogs tweets Facebook posts and microblogs and even the dissemination of government policies on various topics mean that when these posts acquire historical value ensuring their preservation is of critical importance.

From the perspective of cultural heritage preservation social media content is regarded as an important component of collective memory. These materials preserve the digital traces of everyday life archive the multivocal narratives of social events and document cultural transformations. From the perspective of audiovisual archiving social media content carries the collective memory of society and a social history witnessed through visual and audio media just like film and video archives.

Advantages

One of the most important advantages offered by social media archiving is access to detailed and immediate information that traditional documentation methods cannot reach. The direct recording of users’ emotions thoughts and ideas enables multidimensional analysis of social events and provides researchers with unique primary source materials. Unlike traditional archival materials these materials are produced at the moment events occur and reflect real-time social responses.

From the perspective of democratic participation social media archives help governments adopt more transparent and accountable structures by empowering citizens through a two-way and active communication channel. This provides citizens with the opportunity to participate in online consultations regarding official authorities and public issues thereby contributing to the development of democracy or e-democracy.

When combined with big data analytics techniques social media archives possess significant research potential. These data can be used to analyze social trends public opinion shifts and cultural transformations and contribute to future policy development processes. API-based collection methods enable researchers to easily access the specific data they need through rapid search and filtering capabilities based on specific criteria.

Disadvantages

One of the most significant challenges in social media archiving is the technical problems arising from the dynamic nature of this content. The constantly changing nature of social media content complicates the archiving process requiring different technical solutions for each platform and imposing a substantial demand for technical resources to store and process billions of items. Moreover standardizing data formats across different platforms presents a major technical challenge.

Legal and ethical issues constitute one of the most complex areas of social media archiving. The need to protect users’ personal data uncertainties regarding copyright of content each platform’s own terms of use and restrictions and users’ right to request deletion of their data create ongoing legal dilemmas that require constant evaluation in archival processes.

Difficulties in the selection and evaluation processes are also noteworthy. Predicting which content will be valuable to future generations addressing fake news and misinformation and preserving the contextual characteristics of social interactions raise new questions that traditional archival theory cannot answer. In addition the costs of big data storage and processing concerns about technological obsolescence and challenges in the long-term preservation of digital data constitute significant disadvantages from a sustainability perspective.

International Applications

The Twitter archive project carried out in the United States has become one of the most comprehensive examples of social media archiving. Launched by the Library of Congress of the United States in 2010 this project archived approximately 21 billion tweets from 2006 to 2010 and by 2013 the archive had grown to contain over 120 billion tweets amounting to 80 terabytes. However due to increasing tweet volumes and storage problems a strategic shift occurred in 2017 with the decision to archive only thematic sets or event-based tweets. The greatest challenge encountered during this process was developing the necessary technological infrastructure to make the archive comprehensively and usefully accessible to researchers.

The social media archiving project initiated in China in 2015 was conducted under strict internet controls and developed original methodological approaches. Within the project Archive-It software was used for static websites and Social Feed Manager for dynamic sites both of which began processing by extracting data from the applications’ APIs. In this project designed to analyze Chinese socio-political activism and civil society movements millions of Weibo posts and over a thousand blog articles were converted into a digital collection.

The United Kingdom example was shaped by a pilot project launched in 2011 jointly by the UK National Archives and the Internet Memory Foundation. This approach developed to capture official central government interactions on Twitter and YouTube adopted an archiving methodology based on direct data collection from platform APIs. For Twitter content was gathered via APIs and retweets were organized using a custom script while for YouTube videos were collected along with their metadata to develop a new infrastructure. All archived content is made publicly available through the national archives website.

Preservation Strategies and Recent Developments

Strategies developed for content selection in social media archives include prioritizing the archiving of content from official public institutions and official accounts evaluating content with high engagement and social significance identifying materials related to important events and periods and determining materials that can contribute to collective memory. Implementing these criteria requires addressing the digital environment’s unique methods which cannot be fully covered by traditional archival theory requirements.

In terms of metadata management comprehensive systems have been developed for social media archives including technical metadata such as file format size and date information descriptive metadata such as content descriptions keywords and categories structural metadata such as links and relationships between content items and administrative metadata such as access rights and usage conditions. These systems are critically important for ensuring that archived content can be effectively found and used by future users.

From the perspective of technological advancements innovative approaches are being developed in social media archiving including artificial intelligence-based content analysis and automatic categorization automatic identification of valuable content through machine learning proof of integrity and originality using blockchain technology and scalable storage solutions through cloud technologies. These technologies contribute to making archival processes more efficient and reliable.

In the future social media archiving will face new challenges including mobile applications that cannot be archived using traditional web archiving methods time-limited content such as Snapchat and Instagram Stories archiving of video audio and interactive content and live broadcasts and real-time messaging platforms. Efforts continue to develop international technical standards metadata standards ethical guidelines and collaboration protocols to overcome these challenges.