Disappearing: Digital permanence, or the idea that content put online stays there indefinitely, is a bit of a fallacy and there’s data to back up the claim. According to a recent analysis from Pew Research Center, a full 38 percent of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible just a decade later.
Furthermore, a quarter of all web pages that existed during that same period – between 2013 and 2023 – were no longer accessible as of last October. In most cases, this was due to individual pages being deleted or moved on otherwise functional sites. Occasionally, however, entire root domains were no longer functional.
It’s not just legacy content that is disappearing at an alarming rate. According to Pew Research, around eight percent of web pages that existed in 2023 are no longer on the web.
A deeper dive revealed that 23 percent of news sites contained at least one broken link, as did 21 percent of government websites. Over on Wikipedia, a whopping 54 percent of entries studied contained at least one dead link in the “references” section.
Content shared on social media is equally susceptible to digital decay. Pew Research gathered a real time sample of tweets from X (known as Twitter at time time) in the spring of 2023 and found that one in five were no longer visible just months after being posted. Researchers said that in 60 percent of these cases, the account that originally posted the content was made private, was suspended, or was deleted entirely when revisited.
Social media content written in certain languages was also more likely to disappear with time. For example, more than 40 percent of posts in Arabic and Turkish were gone within three months of being published.
Non-profits tasked with preserving the web’s content such as the Internet Archive do exist but more often than not, their backs are against the wall due to things like limited budgets and the rise of paywalled content.
Image credit: Marek Piwnicki
