Challenges in Capturing Highly Ephemeral Content

The next speakers at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Marco Toledo Bastos and Shawn Walker, whose interest is in the ephemerality of hyperpartisan news content. Posts, images, and videos often disappear within hours and days of posting, before they can be fact-checked and before standard archiving platforms such as national archives or the Internet Archive would capture them. Alternatively, the content of these posts may change after posting, meaning that the captured content does not reflect what users first saw.

There is a need for a very high-fidelity, rapid archiving approach especially around critical events, therefore, that captures content, at scale, as soon as it is posted. This might require the rendering of those posts in the context of the platforms on which they are displayed, as well as screen captures of that rendered content.

Such an approach is able to better capture how this content emerges and disappears, and in fact might enable the use of ephemerality itself as an indicator of the hyperpartisan or otherwise problematic nature of the content – higher-quality content tends to stick around for longer, while lower-quality content changes more rapidly or disappears altogether.