According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, based on data from the Common Crawl web repository, 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 have now disappeared. This research, which covers the period from 2013 to 2023, highlights the transitory nature of online content, revealing an increasingly pronounced trend: "digital decline."
Reasons and consequences of "digital decline"
Web digital decay
Pew Research Center research identifies several causes for the disappearance of content on the Internet. Among them, the elimination of entire web pages and the inaccessibility of previously functional links. In fact, 25% of all web pages that existed during the period studied were no longer accessible in October 2023.
"Digital decline", according to this report, does not discriminate and affects different types of content. For example, the study found that 21% of government websites had broken links. Similarly, 54% of Wikipedia entries contained at least one link in the “References” section that no longer led anywhere.
Digital decline Social Networks
Content volatility is not unique to traditional websites; Social networks also show a high disappearance rate. During a three-month analysis conducted in spring 2023, it was found that nearly one in five tweets posted on X were no longer publicly visible within months of being posted. Most of these disappearances were due to accounts becoming private, suspended, or deleted.
Additionally, certain types of tweets are more likely to disappear, especially those posted in languages such as Turkish and Arabic, from profiles with the default profile image, or from unverified accounts. Interestingly, about 6% of the tweets that disappeared eventually became available again, which is attributed to changes to account privacy settings or the reinstatement of suspended accounts.
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