Online content is ephemeral. A new Pew Research Center analysis shows that a quarter of websites that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer available. In most cases, this is due to the removal of the entire website or the removal of one page from a specific domain (so the remaining pages of the website remain available). If we focus on old content, The removal trend is more pronounced: about 38%. Sites that existed in 2013 are no longer available onlineCompared to 8 percent of the sites that existed in 2023
Analysts from the Pew Research Center call this situation “digital decline.” They analyzed sites ranging from entertainment, government and news sites, as well as the “footnotes” sections of Wikipedia. The conclusions are very interesting.
At least one link is broken
The study shows that 23 percent of websites on the Internet have at least one broken link, meaning at least one subpage cannot open. In the case of government websites, this measure is slightly smaller at 21%. These issues are most evident on local government websites, where there is often a shortage of specialists who can fix broken subpages. The number of broken links there is relatively high.
However, Wikipedia is full of outdated and broken content. The Pew Research Center reports that up to 54 percent of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in the “footnotes” section that leads to a page that no longer exists. Let us add that the analysis included a random sample of 50,000 people. Wikipedia pages are in English, with the vast majority of pages (82%) containing at least one link in the “Footnotes” section. In total, there were just over a million reference links across all pages, and a typical Wikipedia page had four such links.
Interestingly, while in the case of 54 percent at least one “footnote” link did not work, in 11 percent of the cases, all of these links did not work. This shows that not only does a lot of information and resources evaporate from the Internet, but the credibility of Wikipedia entries also decreases if the recipient cannot verify the sources of the information.
Digital distribution of social media
If Wikipedia has a problem with pages disappearing, you can guess that In social media this phenomenon occurs often.
For this analysis, Pew Research Center collected nearly 5 million tweets posted from March 8 to April 7, 2023. The organization then monitored all tweets through June 15, 2023, checking them daily to see if they were still available on the X platform. (Formerly: Twitter). as it turned out?
At the end of the analysis it was found that 18 percent of Tweets from the initial period are no longer publicly available. In most cases, this was because the account that posted the Tweet in question was set private, suspended, or deleted entirely. For the remaining tweets, the author’s account was still visible and accessible, but the tweet itself was simply deleted.
An interesting note is that Nearly half of the Turkish language tweets analyzed have disappeared from the Internet. Therefore, posts published in this language were likely to be deleted or disappeared. In second place were the entries in Arabic.
Deleted tweets also often come from accounts that use default settings and are not verified. This could mean that someone simply tried using Twitter, tested the platform’s capabilities, but ultimately decided they didn’t want to use it and deleted their posts.
Analysts also noted the following:
- 1 percent of tweets are deleted within one hour of being posted
- 3 percent disappears during the day
- 10 percent within a week
- 15 percent within a month
Pew Research Center did not analyze other social networking sites, but it can be assumed that a lot of content there also disappears forever after some time.
Pages of the past decade easily disappear
The researchers also collected a sample of randomly selected pages from the archives of Common Crawl, an online archiving service that periodically collects snapshots of the Internet over specific time periods. In total, approximately one million pages were analysed. The Pew Research Center reported that it analyzed websites from 2013 to 2023, trying to select nearly 90,000 websites. Pages from every year. Then it was checked whether the websites were still working or if they were no longer available.
It turns out 25 percent of all pages collected from 2013 to 2023 are no longer available in October 2023. This data applies to entire domains and individual subpages in the selected domains. Furthermore, up to 38 percent of pages from 2013 disappeared from the Internet after just a decade.
The Internet is often viewed as a never-ending source of information, but research shows that it is It is much more elusive than it seems.
An analysis by the Pew Research Center showed that up to 25 percent of sites that existed from 2013 to 2023 are no longer available, meaning… It challenges belief in the “eternal life” of online content. Even Wikipedia, a treasure trove of knowledge, suffers from the problem of expired links – 54 percent of pages have at least one broken link in the “Footnotes” section. In contrast, in social media such as Twitter (currently Next time we see something online that we think is valuable to us, it’s better to take a screenshot instead of saving it to your browser bookmarks.
Author: Grzegorz Kobra, journalist at Business Insider Polska
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