wrennette

i’ve seen a few posts bemoaning the loss of twitter-as-public-square, as well as the loss of material posted there in the past. and realized maybe not everyone remembers, and this isn’t a 100% solution to the loss of that material, but in 2010 the library of congress in the us was given the record of all public tweets up to that point in time (announcement here). loc staff wrote a blog post about it (here) that includes links to later updates (2013 status report), and until 2017 was transferring all public tweets to the loc (status report).

there are a lot of caveats. not all of those tweets are searchable / accessible yet since it takes the archivists time to process things. since 2017 public tweets are selected for archiving based on loc criteria rather than all tweets automatically being archived. only public tweets were / are archived, etc.

but a lot is already archived, and some of it is already searchable on loc.gov. also, if you use firefox, archive.org has a plugin you can use to archive sites using the wayback machine, which could be useful here, as well as in other situations where you want to preserve a webpage you think might be in danger of disappearing. i've found old geocities and tripod fics because they were on wayback machine.