Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

URL Arguments in API Calls Can Cause Intermittent Temporal Violations While Replaying Archived Web Pages  Michael L. Nelson 2026-05-26 Just over two months ago, I was at the ​ Information Stewardship Forum 2026 at the Internet Archive, where I was fortunate enough to present a lightning talk about making copies of copies, entitled " The Disintegration Loops: Generational Loss in Web Archives ".  During one of the breaks, Mark Graham asked Sawood Alam to take a look at a problem that had stumped the Wayback Machine support team.  I was sitting next to Sawood, and knowing my love for web archiving investigations, Mark invited me to take a look too.  The original inquiry: Hi, everyone! Got a concerning report from a patron alleging that WBM "URLs were intermittently displaying the current version of the website instead of the archived version." The URLs in question are: https://web.archive.org/web/20240222221058/https://www.victoriassecret.com/us/site-terms...

  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 typ...