Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: Each tweet ID is a unique identifier that encodes the tweet creation timestamp , example adapted from Snowflake ID, Wikipedia . Web archives, such as the Wayback Machine , are indexed by URL. For example, if we want to search for a tweet we must first know its URL. Figure 2 demonstrates that searching for a tweet URL results in a timemap of that tweet archived at different points in time. Clicking on a particular datetime will show the archived tweet at that particular point in time.   Figure 2: An archived tweet URL results in a timemap consisting of archived copies of the tweet. Figure 3 shows a screenshot of a tweet shared by @_llebrun . The tweet in the screenshot was originally posted by @randyhillier who later deleted his tweet. The screenshot of the tweet does not have the tweet's URL on the image. Moreover, when a tweet is deleted, we will not be able to find the tweet URL on the live web, nor will we know how to  look it up in the archive. Figure 3: @...