Twitter’s branding death, the rate-limiting of social media content, and the wide-spread rapid changes to the platform should serve as a timely reminder to all internet users that, anything can be removed, at anytime, without warning, and unless you own the platform, or have administrative control over it, your f**ked.
We were taught as children that anything on the internet is permanent, and it’s a good mindset to have because to some extent a trace of your online life will live somewhere, server logs, databases or an offline backup, it will exist in some form, and outlive us. (maybe even the Way-back machine?)
Social media platforms aren’t ours, we don’t get to make the decisions of who can upload what, or how often it’s seen. A Facebook group isn’t ‘your site,’ and relaise that even though it’s your content, it’s fate rests in the hands of business decisions of publicly traded companies. (for the most part.)
Photo’s of your late grandma? – pictures of your child’s first time standing? – those are moments we share, that can be taken away, and if it’s not by the company itself, who’s to say a compromised account because of a weak password, or a vulnerability in a platform renders you content, well dead.
Moral of the story is, it’s up to you, you must archive anything you want to keep, download it, screen capture it. whatever it takes.
