2023-08-22: Lil Tay’s Fake Death Announcement: The Quest for a Deleted Instagram Post in Web Archives

On August 9, 2023,  a post on the Instagram (IG) account of the teenage influencer Lil Tay announced the death of her and her half-brother (Figure 1 - right). Within the following day, Tay's family issued a statement to TMZ, reassuring everyone that she and her brother were alive and safe.  Tay acknowledged that her IG account had been compromised, leading to the dissemination of misleading details about the supposed demise of her and her brother. It's been reported that Meta intervened to regain control of her account, ultimately resulting in the removal of the post. This blog post is about using web archives (specifically, the Internet Archive (IA) and Archive.is) to find the post that was deleted. Although there were no archived copies, or mementos, that successfully replay the content of the deleted post in IA, there is one memento in Archive.is (Figure 7).

Figure 1: A picture of Lil Tay (left) and a screenshot of the post on the Instagram account of Lil Tay announcing the death of her and her half-brother (right)

There are two approaches we can take when it comes to locating a deleted social media post in web archives:

1. Check Archived Copies of the Account Page: One way is to search for mementos of the account page from around the time the post was made. By examining these captures, we can determine if the deleted post exists within any of them.

2. Find the Post's URL: Another method involves finding the URL of the specific post and then searching for mementos of that post itself. However, if the post has been taken down, it can be challenging to find the URL of the post. 

Checking Archived Copies of the Account Page

The IG account page URL of Lil Tay is https://www.instagram.com/liltay/. As of August 13, 2023, there were 161 mementos of her account page (Figure 2) in IA out of which all the mementos from August are redirections to the IG login page. Unfortunately, this means that none of these captures have preserved the posts on Tay’s IG account. The issue of IG mementos redirecting to the login page in IA was examined by Haley Bragg et al. in their paper titled “Less than 4% of Archived Instagram Account Pages for the Disinformation Dozen are Replayable” which is published at JCDL 2023. 

Figure 2: Time-Map for the URL https://www.instagram.com/liltay/

When I checked on Archive.is there were 6 mementos of her account page (Figure 3) out of which two were from August, but there were captures of error pages so none of them had captured the posts in Tay’s IG account either.

Figure 3: Time-Map for the URL https://www.instagram.com/liltay/

Finding the Post's URL

In an attempt to find the URL of the deleted post, I used the phrase lil tay instagram deleted post. I checked the first couple of articles that were on the Google SERP and found out that none of them had the URL of the deleted post although one of them had a screenshot of the deleted post. 

Figure 4: Google search result for lil tay instagram deleted post 

I changed the search term I entered into Google to lil tay instagram deleted post "instagram.com/p/" to include part of the IG post URL format instagram.com/p/ enclosed in quotation marks (Figure 5). This was done to make use of Google's exact phrase search feature.

Figure 5: Google search result for lil tay instagram deleted post "instagram.com/p/"

This time, the article that appeared as the top result in the Google SERP contained the URL for the deleted post at the end of the article. The specific URL for the post is: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvuphvirkOz/ (Figure 6).

Figure 6: The post that announced the death of Lil Tay and her brother is no longer available on the live web.

Now, with the URL for the deleted post found, I looked into the mementos of the post in IA (Time-Map for https://www.instagram.com/p/CvuphvirkOz/). There was one memento for the post on August 9, 2023, in IA but unfortunately, that capture was after the post was taken down so the memento is also a capture of the error page. 

Next, I checked if there are any mementos of the post in Archive.is (Time-Map for https://www.instagram.com/p/CvuphvirkOz/) and there was only one memento (Figure 7). Fortunately, it was a memento captured on August 9, 2023, the day of the incident. Even more fortunately, it was captured prior to the post being removed, making it the only memento of this deleted post that renders properly across both the Internet Archive and Archive.is. This further emphasizes the risks associated with relying solely on one web archive for webpage preservation.

Figure 7: A memento of the deleted post at Archive.is displaying the image and some of the engagements with the post

An alternative method for finding the post's URL involves focussing on finding news reports that covered the incident prior to its removal. These news articles often provide links to the Instagram post as supporting evidence. For example, the New York Post piece covering the alleged death of social media figure Lil Tay links to the Instagram post, highlighting that it was through this post that Lil Tay's representatives conveyed news of her and her brother's death.

Nevertheless, if the post was taken down instantly before it was reported or noticed, it is likely that Google might not have indexed it, and then tracing the post URL becomes impossible. This also brings to mind another instance that highlights this open problem with respect to discoverability, as discussed in one of my previous blog posts titled “Digging Up a Gem Through the Web Archives”. In that post, I showed how I used the live web (specifically, the Google search engine) to uncover the URL of an article, which I then employed to query web archives. In my master's thesis titled “Supporting Account-based Queries for Archived Instagram Posts”, I have discussed in detail the IG URL structure, the challenges associated with mapping an IG post URL to its user, and approaches to simplify the discovery of mementos of posts associated with a particular Instagram account within web archives.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I have documented the process of discovering a deleted post from Lil Tay’s IG account. This post was published, notifying the public of the death of both her and her brother while her IG account was compromised by a 3rd party. To sum up, it is hard to find mementos of a deleted IG post without knowing the URL of the deleted post. Even when the post URL is found, there may only be a limited number of mementos for Instagram posts in web archives. Within IA, we saw how the mementos lead to redirects on IG's login page. Archive.is had one memento which was luckily a memento captured on the day of the incident. This memento was captured prior to the post's deletion, making it invaluable. It stands as the sole memento displaying the content of this post on both the Internet Archive and Archive.is.

-- Himarsha R. Jayanetti