Consumer Social Media Free at the Point of Use
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Social media platforms free at the point of use with a business model based on reselling user data for consumer behavior and/or advertising analysis, mainly for profit-driven corporations. This entry broadly includes digital content created, shared and hosted on social media platforms as well as current interfaces of social media platforms. |
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Digital Species: Social Media |
Trend in 2023:
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Consensus Decision |
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Added to List: 2017 |
Trend in 2024:
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Previously: Critically Endangered |
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Imminence of Action Immediate action necessary. Where detected, should be stabilized and reported as a matter of urgency. |
Significance of Loss The loss of tools or services within this group would have a global impact. |
Effort to Preserve | Inevitability Loss seems likely. By the time tools or techniques have been developed, the material will likely have been lost. |
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Examples Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, Pinterest, Yahoo Groups, Truth Social, Reddit, Mumsnet, Sina Weibo, Flickr, Bebo, and legacy BBS. |
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‘Practically Extinct’ in the Presence of Aggravating Conditions Lack of preservation capacity in provider; Lack of preservation commitment or incentive from provider; proprietary products or formats, including user interface; poor data protection; inaccessibility to web archiving; political or commercial interference; Lack of offline equivalent; super-abundance; Uncertainty over IPR or the presence of orphaned works; Lossy compression in upload scripts. |
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‘Endangered’ in the Presence of Good Practice Offline backup and documentation of media assets; Migration plan; Early warning from vendors; Roadmap from vendors; Accessible to web harvest; Suitable export functionality; Licencing enables preservation; Preservation commitment from vendor; Preservation capability in vendor; Resilient to hacking; Selection criteria. |
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2023 Review This entry was added by the 2019 Jury as a subset of a broader social media entry first introduced in 2017. It was created as a standalone entry to draw attention to the different threats faced by online services that are paid for versus ‘free at the point of use’ (both depend on the business model of the vendor and the terms they impose). The 2021 Jury raised the risk classification from Endangered to Critically Endangered based on concerns arising with trends towards harmful and malicious hate speech as well as misinformation and deliberate deletion. The 2022 Taskforce agreed on a trend towards even greater risk based on the continued, significant trend towards hate speech, misinformation and disinformation, and deliberate deletion in light of ongoing global conflicts that include (but are not limited to) social and economic inequalities and climate change. In particular, they mentioned the sale of Twitter prompting a moment of instability in consumer social media, with the scale of Twitter, evident acrimony between parties prior to the sale and the hostile news coverage afterward, elevating the risks associated with social media. They also brought to attention issues surrounding platforms enabling extreme views not permitted on mainstream platforms, which emerged and proliferated noticeably and, from a preservation standpoint, could be argued are potentially at very high risk and historically significant. Based on the assessment of the rescoped entry, the 2023 Council agreed on the Critically Endangered classification and noted an increase in the imminence of action required as well as the effort to preserve. The need for major efforts to prevent or reduce losses continues, but it is now much more likely that loss of material has already occurred and will continue to do so by the time tools or techniques have developed. There is a greater urgency to prioritize the assessment of these materials and develop tools or techniques to prevent or reduce further losses in this group. The 2023 Council recommended further rescoping and adjusting of this and other social media entries in light of how web-based and cloud-based business products and services have developed in recent years. This included:
The 2023 Bit List Council additionally recommended that the next major review for the Bit List include:
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2024 Interim Review The 2024 Council identified a trend towards even greater risk due to a number of factors, summarized below. Creators and archivists relying on consumer social media free at the point of use inhabit a precarious position. Free services may be favored by agencies or individual creators who are least able to respond to closure or loss because of the low barrier to entry associated with ‘free at the point of use’ services. Proprietary interfaces and services pose risks, as companies prevent third-party attempts to preserve either hosted content and/or the end-user experience of the environment. An inability to preserve social media interfaces diminishes future potential for emulation and may inhibit researchers' ability to glean important context, as described in the Bit List 2023 review. Additional barriers to preservation via web capture are also present in terms of service for user accounts that explicitly prohibit crawling. For example, the X Terms of Service state “You may not access the Services in any way other than through the currently available, published interfaces that we provide. For example, this means that you cannot scrape the Services, try to work around any technical limitations we impose, or otherwise attempt to disrupt the operation of the Services” and “crawling or scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose without our prior written consent is expressly prohibited” (X, 2023). Another example, from the Facebook Terms of Service, states “You may not access or collect data from our Products using automated means” (Facebook, 2022). An additional recommendation for the next 2025 review is to assess if ‘proprietary formats’ (e.g. the platform interfaces) adequately demonstrates the scope of this entry and answers the first bullet point of the 2023 Council recommendation. The 2023 recommendations for re-scoping and combining entries will also be assessed in more detail in 2025. 2024 Council members also raised concerns regarding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, noting that for this entry and, more broadly, anything related to Social Media, an emerging risk is AI training fears. This manifests in two ways:
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Additional Comments Social media free-at-the-point-of-use remains at a critical risk due in large part to the policies of unregulated (or underregulated) corporate platforms such as Facebook, X (previously Twitter), and their parent companies. The content shared on these platforms and the history of the development of platform infrastructure and policy itself provide a critical source of information for policy-makers and researchers. The complete lack of preservation provision and deliberate obstruction of archiving attempts for public interest puts this valuable content at high risk of loss and draws attention to the critical risk posed by these examples of platforms. Content hosted on social media platforms (that users might not have stored elsewhere) is at risk and users may lose the opportunity to keep their own data for personal archiving or to donate to an organization. Collecting organizations may lose the opportunity to archive hosted content within their collecting remit using web or API harvesting tools. In both instances, data remains at high risk because it is hosted by companies that could change policies or access on a whim. Also, the inability to archive even free content unless you have a login as an archivist (like with Browsertrix). Additionally, there are social media companies requiring payment to access data for preservation. There are interfaces of social media platforms that researchers may want to see to study the evolution of the platforms over time (through web harvesting typically) that are at risk. Preservation is affected by researcher API access being shut down, halting preservation of entire platforms. There are also differences between the themes/collecting policies of institutions and researchers who are scraping their own data and depositing it in repositories. Preserving this stuff en masse is still incredibly difficult, but many of these platforms allow the downloading of their own personal content/archives. However, these lose all the context of social media and therefore, whilst they do preserve the data, they do not preserve the essence of the material. Platforms like X (previously Twitter) have both opened and closed their API further in recent years, but others like Yahoo have closed, and Facebook, as well as X (formerly Twitter), continues to be almost hostile towards archiving and preservation attempts. With digital materials from premium or institutional social media services, the business model and sustainability are more obvious, and contracts may be enforceable more readily. Moreover, because these services have a slightly higher barrier to entry, they may be favored by agencies that are better able to respond to closure or loss. Traditional web archiving can be employed where the user pays for a service, but the content is ultimately publicly available (such as Flickr). But much is unclear about how to preserve internal social media / closed networks that web archiving cannot get to, or existing tools do not cover. Social media capture via web harvesting has become increasingly difficult. Social media platforms have done nothing to address the barriers to automated capture that prevent the preservation of even so-called public content. For example, campaign websites or other election-related content that is only published on Facebook or on X (previously Twitter) because these services are ‘free.’ This content is of particular concern as it appears on no other website. Web archivists are constantly shifting strategies and approaches and trying out new (but limited) tools to best capture this content. If we cannot successfully preserve these platforms, we are missing out on documenting organizations, campaigns and elections around the globe. Much of this data exists as data sets based on aggregated use rather than individual files. Often these are external proprietary platforms bound by intellectual property law and potentially privacy law which will impede the imminence of action. What recourse do archives or digital repositories have to deal with this and capture the materials? Case Studies or Examples:
See also:
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Towards even greater risk