Some internet users may have searched for a website that has been visited before, but the browser does not display the requested page or cannot load the website at all. This may be what the nonpartisan Pew Research Center calls “digital decay”. They say 38 percent or one-third of websites from 2013 will no longer be accessible by October 2023. A quarter of the pages that were online between 2013 and 2023 have now disappeared. See photo 38 percent of websites from 2013 are no longer accessible(Paw Research Center) according to the Pew study, which used a sample of nearly a million pages stored by the nonprofit Common Crawl archives, many links in those places now only display a “404 error” message.
Pew Research says digital decay has also been eating away at news sites, government, and even Wikipedia. In a sample of 500,000 government websites, for example, about 21 percent displayed at least one broken link. On 2,063 news sites, the number reached 23 percent. Among the 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages sampled, 54 percent had at least one broken link in the “References”section. The disappearing tweets are not the only websites affected by digital decay.
Researchers from the Pew Research Center also examined the social media platform X, which at the time of the survey was still called Twitter. The result is even worse. Of the total 4.8 million tweets collected by the research institution from March 8 to April 27, 2023, 18 percent of them were no longer visible to the public on June 15, or not even 2 months when the last time the tweets were collected by Pew. Also read: 5 AI websites to create Disney Pixar posters that are Viral on social media Pew said that more than 60 percent of the tweets that disappeared were caused by the accounts behind them that also disappeared from public view (Pew did not specify the account was deleted or private). The rest comes from accounts that are still accessible. Chirping in certain languages is said to disappear faster than in other languages. For example, 49 percent of tweets in Turkish and 42 percent of tweets in Arabic are said to have disappeared on Twitter during the study period. Uniquely, tweets from accounts that have a biography or default profile picture aka biography or default profile photo from Twitter are more likely to disappear on that social media. Pew asserts that about 6 percent of kiacaun that previously disappeared can also reappear. It said this could be caused by a change in account status from private to public or from accounts that were previously suspended and then restored.
Why did it happen? There are several reasons why these pages disappear. First, the content publisher switches to the new content management system (CMS) without including the links that were created in the old CMS. Second, the publisher has gone out of business. Even so, users can still access the old web through a web archive such as Common Crawl and the Internet Archive which often stores copies of pages of sites that have been deleted. Because, many Wikipedia articles refer to the original link and its copy in the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive can also collect tweets, so users can browse tweets on Twitter that have been lost, as compiled by NEWS from PCMag, Thursday (23/5/2024).