In the summer of 2020 millions of people around the world posted on social media about what they were experiencing during a global pandemic, a major wave of protests over racial justice, and a contentious election season.
Those posts were raw, real, firsthand accounts of what it felt like to be alive during one of the most significant periods in recent American history. They captured things that no journalist or historian could capture. The confusion and fear of the early pandemic. The anger and hope of the protest movement. The way ordinary people experienced and understood what was happening around them.
Most of those posts are already gone or inaccessible.
Why Social Media Is a Historical Source
When historians study a period of history they rely on primary sources. Documents written by people who were actually there. Letters. Diaries. Newspaper accounts. Official records.
Social media posts are exactly that. They are firsthand accounts written in real time by people experiencing events directly. They capture the language people actually used. The emotions they actually felt. The way they understood events before the official narrative got written.
For future historians trying to understand the early twenty first century, social media is one of the richest primary sources available. The problem is that most of it is not being preserved in a usable form.
Why Most of It Will Disappear
Social media companies control their platforms and can change the rules at any time. Accounts get deleted. Platforms go out of business. Posts get removed for violating terms of service that change without notice. Companies decide to limit the archiving of old content.
Twitter, now X, has made repeated changes to its platform that have affected access to historical posts. TikTok videos disappear when accounts are deleted. Facebook has changed its privacy settings in ways that make older public content inaccessible. Instagram has purged accounts for inactivity.
The Library of Congress attempted to archive all public Twitter posts from 2006 through 2017. The project proved so massive and technically complex that they eventually had to scale it back significantly.
The early days of social media are already partially lost. And we are adding more content every day while losing access to what came before.
What You Can Do
Save your own important posts. Screenshot them. Copy the text somewhere you control. Do not assume the platform will keep them.
If you post things worth preserving, post them in multiple places. A blog post is more permanent than a social media post. Text on archive.org is more permanent than text on a platform you do not control.
For posts you want to preserve because they document something important, use the Wayback Machine's save page feature at web.archive.org/save to create an archived copy of any public URL.
Support the Internet Archive. They are doing the work of trying to capture and preserve the web including social media content at a scale that no individual can match.
And keep writing. Keep posting. Keep documenting what you see and feel and experience. The fact that platforms are fragile does not mean the content is not worth creating. It just means you need to be thoughtful about where you put it and how you save it.
The historical record of this era is being written right now. Some of it will survive. Make sure your part of it does.
Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.
