Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On Friday, Twitter suspended Donald Trump's account due to concerns that his current and future tweets might continue to foment violence in the United States. Hayes Brown from MSNBC and Marshall Cohen from CNN echoed a concern I had when developing MementoEmbed : what happens to the embed if the source material or a service managing the embed goes away? Shoutout to every digital journalist who’s just realized how many articles they now have out there full of broken embeds — Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) January 8, 2021 Trump’s tweets are embedded in thousands of news articles, and now all those links are dead...... — Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) January 8, 2021 Are the embeds really dead? What can we do to provide evidence that the tweet actually existed? Are Trump's tweet embeds dead? No. As explained by Michael Nelson in the Twitter thread below, the embeds still display the tweet text because the tweet contents are stored in the embedding page by-value

  Figure 1: A screen capture where all the tweets in the view-port are filled with “Fact-check label” (left) and “Violated Twitter Rules” label (right). To curb the spread of misinformation on their platform, Twitter warns users by labeling the tweets with misleading content . Twitter labels first came to light on May 26, 2020 when Twitter decided to assign one of their fact-check labels to a tweet from U.S. President Donald Trump. A few days later, on May 29, 2020 Twitter labeled another tweet of Trump for violating Twitter rules about glorifying violence. In addition to labeling the tweet, Twitter also disabled the engagements with this post. In Figure 1, you can see how all of his tweets in the view-port are labeled. We have used the account @realDonaldTrump for this study as this account is frequently archived. As of November 25, 2020, there are 160 tweets authored by @realDonaldTrump that have been labeled by Twitter. For this study, we have broadly categorized the two types o