Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced a purge on inactive accounts. Musk has cited the reasoning as “freeing [up] the name space” for users who might want a new handle. Musk then went on to assure Twitter that these “1.5 billion accounts” would be accounts which have not tweeted or logged-in for the last few years.

This is very much, an expected move. You might recall from our blogpost a while ago that Musk had expressed interest in purging accounts early in November. It should also be noted that Twitter’s previous management had failed a similar policy change in 2019, to expire accounts which had not been logged into for 6 months. That policy change failed due to outrage and protest across the platform.

Well then, should you be worried? Probably not for your own account. Some have expressed concern over the accounts of loved ones or deceased celebrities, which will more easily fit this criteria. If you have such concerns, we can recommend a useful utility from our friend JustAnotherArchivist, called snscrape. snscrape allows you to save public tweets from accounts on Twitter. It also works for a few other websites like Facebook and Reddit.

The code is available at https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape, but if you have Python 3 installed pip3 install snscrape is all you need to install it.

From your terminal or command prompt, the following command will save a local archive of Elon Musk’s tweets:

snscrape --jsonl twitter-user elonmusk > muskytweets.json

And if you want another account, just substitute the username and a file to save to:

snscrape --jsonl twitter-user RetroTechDreams > RTD_tweets.json

I might write a more detailed tutorial on snscrape if people are interested.

But for the time being, spread the word! Save what endangered accounts are valuable to you and be sure to tell all of your friends about snscrape.

This new era of Twitter has been quite turbulent, to say the least. More than half of the workforce has been fired or has quit, and site functionality is becoming unstable, as reported by the Seattle Times. Mastodon has emerged as a serious Twitter alternative. In fact, some of those who have departed Twitter now have their own Mastodon instance over at macaw.social. Personally, I am excited about the rise of mastodon as an alternative as I have been posting Data Horde updates over at @[email protected] for about two years now.

So, why not leave Twitter behind and move on? Now, Twitter allows you to request a copy of your personal data: Tweets and all. But it’s probably hard to leave a site that you have been on for over a decade. Especially, when requesting your personal archive is not even working correctly. Many people have reported that archive requests are being ignored or processed with delay. On a test account, we at Data Horde found that it took over 3 days to receive a personal archive.

In 2022 this is a big deal, not only for archivists but also for legality. Article 13 of the GDPR mandates a responsibility to provide a copy of collected data to users (i.e. data subjects) upon request. Outside of Europe, California’s CCPA has a similar clause protecting the right to know.

There are repercussion for not respecting these rules. Recently another messaging app, Discord, was fined 800 000 Euros for failing to respect data retention periods and security of personal data by French Regulator CNIL. That was actually a reduced fine, given Discord’s conciliatory attitude. If Twitter does not up their game, they may meet a similar fate, if not a worser one.

Now that I have your attention, I would like to direct it to the help page on how to request a personal archive from Twitter: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive . Even if a bit unstable, this is what you need to follow to save a copy of your Tweets.

The Twitter archive is big and burly but not perfect. Johan van der Knijff recently wrote a blogpost on some shortcomings, such as the t.co URL-shortener and some workarounds: https://www.bitsgalore.org/2022/11/20/how-to-preserve-your-personal-twitter-archive

Oh, and by the way. It gets worse: Elon Musk has also stated interest in purging inactive accounts and their Tweet history.

This might not seem like a big deal, except to the one or two of our readers who periodically scrape politician accounts off of https://ballotpedia.org. Yet it is actually a serious turning point. Currently, Twitter does not purge inactive accounts, except in the event of death or incapacitation and by special request.

In 2019 there was an attempted Twitter policy change to expire accounts which had not been logged into for 6 months. This sparked outrage across the platform by those who saw this as unfair to the memory of inactive accounts. In particular, fans of deceased K-Pop artist Kim Jong-hyun, otherwise known as Jonghyun (김종현/종현) came to the defence of his legacy overturning the attempt altogether. Turning back on this decision would go against all of that heritage, people’s heritage, Twitter’s heritage, web heritage. Alas this the projected course of things, even if we cannot prevent it, it is perhaps our duty to protest why it is wrong.

What about the extreme scenario of a total collapse of Twitter? What does that mean for web history? Well, the good new is that people have been thinking on this for much longer than before this year.

Already in 2010 the Library of Congress announced that they would be copying the entire internal archive of Twitter, starting from March 2006.

There are also many smaller grabs on the Internet Archive and archive.today, some of which you have seen linked above. Special mention goes to Archive Team‘s periodical Twitter Stream archive.

Last but not least, you can help! The Internet Archive is collecting Tweet dumps from people as we speak: https://archive.org/services/wayback-gsheets/archive-your-tweets Whether you just want extra insurance for your back-up, or to contribute to the wealth of the web you can help by using the above tool to upload your Tweets to the Internet Archive for generations to come.

That being said, it is likely that you have some CDs lying at home. And if you haven’t thrown it away yet, you might have a CD player, possibly even a portable one. So if you are in the mood for an old movie which somehow hasn’t been grabbed by any streaming service yet, you might as well plop your DVD in and grab some popcorn. Assuming that your CD still works, but of course.

As depicted in the thumbnail, CDs have a notorious tendency to get scratched. While a single scratch won’t render the CD entirely unusable, as little scratches accumulate over time it can become impossible for a player to read the disk. Scratches were most often caused by exposure to elements or handling disks improperly (ex. accidentally scratching a disk with one’s nails).

A decade or two ago, there was a debate on whether or not it was safe to leave a disk inside of the CD player. Seeing as there are a lot of moving parts within a CD player, who’s to say these wouldn’t harm a naked disk when the player was turned off? General consensus was that it was perfectly ok, except for cases where a faulty disk tray might lead to complications. But now, seeing as the years have gone by, leaving a CD in the player might not mean leaving it there for only a week, but potentially for months if not years.

At home, we recently found this particular disk you see here, a copy of Barbie as Rapunzel to be precise, left inside of our portable DVD-player, which we rarely ever use. That being said, we do take it with us on car trips once or twice a year and frequently move it around the house every spring cleaning.

And it seems that the years had taken their toll on the disk. What might have been negligible jostling and bumping around have added up to the point where entire chunks of the DVD are no longer readable. We also happened to discover an unreadable (likely misaligned) cassette tape, which we had left in our family Camcorder the last time we were watching it, which was probably a few years ago.

It might seem like common sense to keep CDs in the most secure container possible, as far as preservation enthusiasts are concerned anyway, but sometimes we just leave them inside of the player and forget to take them out, for years. So it’s perhaps a good habit to also check inside of your old media players (not just CD-players for that matter) to see if you have left inside, you might even find something you thought you had lost ages ago.

While the idea of leaving a CD inside of a vintage CD-player to hide in a time capsule for your unsuspecting offspring might seem tempting, don’t. Keep your CDs in a case, plastic sleeve or something meant for containing it, which doesn’t have any other parts inside. And leave it next to the player. Who knows? Maybe your message might reach them after all…