Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Suspension of user accounts on social media has become a common phenomenon these days. Accounts are usually suspended when the posts do not comply with social media rules and community guidelines. Such posts are controversial and often include extremist, misleading, and abusive statements. The existence of such posts can incite violence among social media users and so, user accounts are suspended to prevent misinformation/disinformation spread on social media. For example, in 2021 Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly posted misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter (Fig. 1) and eventually her personal user account (@mtgreenee) was suspended (Fig. 2). The account is reinstated now.   Figure 1. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s misinformation tweet about COVID-19 vaccines.     Figure 2. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suspended personal Twitter account (@mtgreenee).   Apart from personal Twitter accounts getting suspended, there are examples where mass accounts were suspended....

HTTP  and HTML are the reigning champs in terms of delivering content from the Web to your computer, typically though a Web browser. Content and data available over HTTP could generally be categorized to be mostly within the surface web. This, however, only constitutes a small portion of what content is available on the complete Web. Some protocols, such as FTP, are no longer supported by browsers and accessed by way of more specialized programs. Modern formats, such as IPFS , also exist but have limited adoption and often still require external software. While content available over these non-HTTP protocols is still "on the Net", the extent to which it is archived remains murky. A Trip Down Internet Lane Originally, I was inspired to write this blog post because I was exploring different representations of content on the web I remembered a gem from my younger days on the Internet. That gem was the ASCII Star Wars animation that you could watch over your terminal by ty...