Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: The tweet replayed in Internet Archives’s Wayback Machine has the t.co URI-M (“/web/20210106213519/https://t.co/Pm2PKV0Fp3”) displayed in the memento . URLs shared on Twitter are automatically shortened to t.co links . Twitter does this to track its engagements and also protect its users from sites with malicious content. Twitter replaces these t.co URLs with HTML that suggests the original URL so that the end-user does not see the t.co URLs while browsing. When these t.co URLs are replayed through web archives, they are rewritten to an archived URL (URI-M) and should be rendered in the web archives as in the live web, without displaying these t.co URI-Ms to the end-user. However, as shown in Figure 1, the tweet replayed in Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has the t.co URI-Ms (or at least the relative URL, “/web/20210106213519/https://t.co/Pm2PKV0Fp3”) displayed in the tweet itself.  We first noticed the t.co URL displayed in the memento while exploring the archived Twitte

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