May 24, 2024, 6:10 am | Read time: 3 minutes
Large parts of the internet are slowly disappearing. This is now evidenced by a study in which researchers analyzed a total of 1 million websites over several years.
“Once something lands on the web, it stays there forever.” Most people have probably heard this statement at least once when discussing the liberal posting of data and images on the internet. However, as accurate as the statement may be in many cases, it is not scientifically tenable. This is evidenced by a new study from the U.S. research institute Pew Research Center. According to the study, 38 percent of the websites examined that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. The corresponding content on the internet has thus disappeared.
Researchers Analyzed 1 Million Websites
To arrive at this finding, the research institute collected various internet content over the years. This includes nearly 1 million randomly selected websites–including 500,000 web presences of U.S. government agencies, 500,000 news sites, and 50,000 English-language Wikipedia articles. The researchers analyzed the linked websites and found, for example, that about 23 percent of all news portals redirect to at least one no longer accessible content.
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Wikipedia Articles Particularly Affected
The numbers are particularly alarming for Wikipedia. Here, researchers found that almost every second English-language article in the free encyclopedia has at least one “dead” link in the sources, making the content no longer accessible on the internet. In contrast, government and public institution websites fare best. Only 21 percent of them link to content that is no longer accessible, making them the most reliable in maintaining their websites.
In most cases, the loss is due to individual pages being removed from an otherwise functional web presence, according to the available information.
Almost Every Fifth Post on X Disappeared
This also applies to social networks. Researchers found that one in five of the 5 million posts examined on X (formerly Twitter) in spring 2023 were no longer accessible after a few months. For the analysis, researchers collected 3,000 public posts in real-time every 30 minutes from March 8 to April 27, 2023. They used X’s streaming API. The collected tweets were monitored until June 15, 2023, and checked daily for availability. By the end of this period, they found that 18 percent of the collected posts were no longer publicly visible on the website.
Read also: How to Erase Social Media Sins from the Past
According to the study, the disappearance of internet content on the microblogging service has several reasons. In some cases, the entire account was deleted, while in others, only individual posts were removed.
Particularly interesting: Most posts that are no longer accessible were written in Turkish or Arabic. However, the study does not provide an explanation for this.