from The Washington Post via MSN
The internet’s memory is fading in front of us. Preserve what you can.
by Chris Velazco
I signed up for Facebook in my senior year of high school, just as the service was branching out from its college campus confines. And even then, in those early days, the message from my teachers, my parents, and those talking heads on TV was the same: don’t put anything on the internet that you don’t want floating around forever.
To this day, that’s good advice. But it’s also clear the internet’s memory isn’t exactly the steel trap we were all told it was.
In (what else?) a tweet posted last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said the social media service would be “purging” user accounts if they lay dormant for long enough.
The period of inactivity that would prompt an account deletion is pretty long — Musk said the move would apply to accounts that have gone unused for “several years,” and that accounts would be “archived” in some way. But the lack of clarity around what “archiving” means is little comfort to, say, people who continue to seek a sense of closeness with Twitter-using friends and loved ones who have died or are incarcerated.