Social Media Posts Are Primary Historical Sources and Nobody Is Saving Them

 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.

You Should Be Photographing Old Cemeteries Before They Disappear Forever

 There is a cemetery in Aiken County South Carolina that has headstones dating back to before the Civil War. Some of them are so weathered you can barely read the names. A few of them have already become unreadable. And nobody has been out there in years to document what is left.

That cemetery is not unusual. There are thousands like it across this country.

What Is in Those Cemeteries

Old cemeteries are one of the richest sources of historical information that exists for ordinary people.

A headstone tells you a name. A birth date. A death date. Sometimes a relationship. Sometimes an occupation or a cause of death or a brief description of who the person was. All of that is historical information that exists nowhere else for many of the people buried there.

Family cemeteries on old farmland often contain multiple generations of a single family. Church cemeteries contain the history of entire communities going back as far as the congregation existed. Municipal cemeteries contain the records of everyone who died in a place over generations, including people who left no other documentation behind.

Why They Are Disappearing

Many old cemeteries are on private land that has changed hands multiple times. The current owner may not even know the cemetery is there. Or they may know and not care about maintaining it. Or they may be planning to sell the land for development.

Wooden grave markers rot away in a few decades. Stone markers crack and weather until the inscriptions become unreadable. Without someone to maintain the vegetation around them, headstones get covered by brush and eventually buried.

In some cases cemeteries have literally been paved over. Highways and parking lots and developments built without anyone bothering to check what was there before.

What You Can Do

Go out to old cemeteries in your area and photograph every headstone you can read. You do not need special equipment. Your phone camera is sufficient.

Upload your photographs to Find A Grave at findagrave.com or BillionGraves at billiongraves.com. Both of these sites are free and allow volunteers to add photographs and transcriptions of headstone information. What you upload becomes part of a permanent searchable database that genealogists and historians around the world can access.

If you find a cemetery that is overgrown, contact your local county historical society. Many areas have volunteer cemetery restoration groups who will come out and help clean up and document a neglected site.

If you find evidence of a cemetery that has been destroyed or built over, document what you know and report it to your state historic preservation office. Many states have laws protecting burial sites even when they are on private land.

Those names deserve to be in the record. All it takes is someone willing to go out there and write them down.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Difference Between What the News Reports and What Actually Happened

 In 1968 sanitation workers in Memphis Tennessee went on strike. They were mostly Black men doing dangerous dirty work for poverty wages with no benefits and no protections. Two workers had been crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck and the city had done nothing.

The strike lasted 65 days. It was one of the most significant labor actions of the civil rights era. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to support the strikers and was assassinated there.

The news coverage at the time focused heavily on the violence and disruption of the protests. On the National Guard presence. On the property damage. Much less on the actual conditions the workers were striking against or the economic system that had produced those conditions.

The news told one story. History tells a fuller one.

Why News Coverage Is Not the Same as History

News is written in real time with incomplete information. Reporters are working fast, often without full context, trying to describe something that is still unfolding. What they produce is a first draft of history. A useful one. But a draft.

News coverage is shaped by what editors decide is interesting to their audience. Conflict is interesting. Drama is interesting. The slow grinding reality of poverty or injustice or institutional failure is less interesting to cover day by day, even when it is more important.

News coverage is also shaped by access. Reporters cover what they can get to and who will talk to them. Official sources have press offices and spokespeople who know how to get their version of events into the record. Ordinary people and poor communities do not have those resources.

The result is a record that is skewed toward official perspectives, dramatic moments and conflict, and away from context, root causes and the experiences of ordinary people.

How to Read the News as a Historical Document

When you read news coverage of a current event, ask what is not being covered. What is the background to this story that the article does not explain. Who are the people most affected by this and are they being quoted. What would this story look like if it were told from a different perspective.

Save primary sources when you can. Photographs. Documents. Firsthand accounts from people directly involved. These are the materials that historians will rely on when they try to understand this moment fifty years from now.

Write your own account of things you witness. You are a primary source. Your perspective on what is happening around you is exactly what future historians will wish they had more of.

The news gives you the first draft. You can help write a better one.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.