If twitter is the "first draft of history", then we should be doing a better job of preserving it. For the one year anniversary of the Egyptian revolution (2012) we revisited a sample of the shared social media content and found nearly 11% missing from the current web, and only 20% available in public web archives. Spurred by this, we sampled tweets for ve other culturally important events from 2009-2012 and found similar rates for archiving and loss.

1. The Revolution Will Not Be Archived
11% of the Social Media About the Egyptian Revolution Has Been Lost In One Year.
Hany M. SalahEldeen and Michael L. Nelson
hany@cs.odu.edu, mln@cs.odu.edu
How Long Do the Links We Share Last? Event Based Analysis
If twitter is the ”first draft of history”, then we should be doing a better job of preserving it. For the one
year anniversary of the Egyptian revolution (2012) we revisited a sample of the shared social media content
and found nearly 11% missing from the current web, and only 20% available in public web archives. Spurred
by this, we sampled tweets for five other culturally imporant events from 2009–2012 and found similar rates
for archiving and loss.
Persistent Content Missing Content
https://twitter.com/aishes/status/32485352102952960
https://twitter.com/omar chaaban/status/32203697597452289
Results
Dataset Collection
Stage 1: Egyptian Revolution Stage 2: Other Historic Events
• 3 Storify Entries: • Michael Jackson’s Death (June 2009): 2293 Tweets
(26 Videos, 179 Images, 17 Links).
• Iran Elections (July 2009): 3429 Tweets
• IamJan25.com,
(2928 Images; 2387 Videos). • H1N1 Virus (Sep 2009): 5517 Tweets
• Tweets From Tahrir book • Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize (Oct 2009): 1118 Tweets
(1118 tweets, 23 Embedded Images). • Syrian Uprising (Mar 2012): 1955 Tweets
Conclusion
After the first year, nearly 11% of the content is lost. After that nearly 7.3% of the content posted in social
media is lost annually.
References
1- Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?
Hany M. SalahEldeen and Michael L. Nelson. TPDL2012.