Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter appears to have led the platform into a spiral of chaos as more workers flee from the company, with half of the labor force depleted and the headquarters office closed - speculations that the app will completely shut down are on the loose.
Many users have reported indicators that the network is disintegrating in real time after Musk fired thousands of employees, including glitching home pages and log-in difficulties.
As reported first by The Guardian, experts are now advising users to archive their tweets if the app suddenly meets its demise.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS APRIL 25: Tweets by Elon Musk are shown on a computer April 25, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois. It was announced today that Twitter has accepted a $44 billion bid from Musk to acquire the company.
Digital Archiving
According to Caroline Sinders, a fellow at the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, it is now time to learn digital archiving techniques.
Digital archiving, the practice of storing online content, has been increasingly popular since the invention of the internet, although it still functions in a decentralized system.
Throughout Twitter's 16-year history, The Guardian noted that there had been numerous attempts to save posts. For instance, the Library of Congress started preserving all tweets in 2007 but stopped in 2017 due to the platform's expanding user base. Now, it saves tweets selectively.
Influential accounts' tweets have a higher likelihood of being saved. According to a spokesperson for the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration keeps the material of all official federal Twitter accounts.
Media organizations and activists now have monitoring systems thanks to ProPublica's "Politiwoops," a tool that keeps track of deleted tweets from public figures.
PolitiTweet is another monitoring tool that seeks to hold public officials accountable by recording and storing their tweets.
The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, established in 1996, is the biggest public web archive and provides freely accessible tools for online content submission and storage. More than 625 billion web pages, including some tweets, have been stored in its archive.
According to Jason Scott, a free-range archivist at the Internet Archive who has worked to archive portions of Twitter over the last 15 years, many platforms, such as Twitter, do not make it simple to save content in the case of their demise.
This highlights a challenging issue on a cultural, engineering, and financial level, according to Scott, since the majority of companies do not account for their mortality in their engineering design.
Read also: Elon Musk Wants Twitter Employees to Work Long Hours! What Will Happen to Non-Compliant Staff?
Looming Security Threat?
With half of Twitter's workforce reduced and more of them walking out, this also poses a looming threat to the app's security, according to a report by WIRED.
The possible result of the chaos currently happening on Twitter could make it vulnerable to cyberattacks, especially a huge data breach that could compromise the security of its users, according to experts.
David Kennedy, CEO of the incident response company TrustedSec, claimed that Twitter has been ignoring security for a very long time, making it more vulnerable to security risks.
"There's a lot of work to be done to stabilize and secure the platform, and there is definitely an elevated risk from a malicious insider perspective due to all the changes occurring. As time passes, the probability of an incident lowers, but the security risks and technology debt are still there," Kennedy said in a statement with WIRED.
Related Article: TikTok CEO Emphasizes the Need for Content Management Amid Twitter Layoffs
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Written by Jace Dela Cruz
