Zannettou, S;
Blackburn, J;
Sirivianos, M;
Stringhini, G;
(2018)
Understanding Web Archiving Services and Their (Mis)Use on Social Media.
In:
Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
(pp. pp. 454-463).
AAAI
Preview |
Text
capsules-ICWSM2018.pdf - Accepted Version Download (953kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Web archiving services play an increasingly important role in today's information ecosystem, by ensuring the continuing availability of information, or by deliberately caching content that might get deleted or removed.Among these, the Wayback Machine has been proactively archiving, since 2001, versions of a large number of Web pages, while newer services like archive.is allow users to create on-demand snapshots of specific Web pages, which serve as time capsules that can be shared across the Web. In this paper, we present a large-scale analysis of Web archiving services and their use on social media, shedding light on the actors involved in this ecosystem, the content that gets archived, and how it is shared. We crawl and study: 1) 21M URLs from archive.is, spanning almost two years; and 2) 356K archive.is plus 391K Wayback Machine URLs that were shared on four social networks: Reddit, Twitter, Gab, and 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) over 14 months. We observe that news and social media posts are the most common types of content archived, likely due to their perceived ephemeral and/or controversial nature. Moreover, URLs of archiving services are extensively shared on "fringe" communities within Reddit and 4chan to preserve possibly contentious content. Lastly, we find evidence of moderators nudging or even forcing users to use archives, instead of direct links, for news sources with opposing ideologies, potentially depriving them of ad revenue.
Type: | Proceedings paper |
---|---|
Title: | Understanding Web Archiving Services and Their (Mis)Use on Social Media |
Event: | 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018), 25-28 June 2018, Palo Alto, California, USA |
Location: | Palo Alto, CA |
Dates: | 25 June 2018 - 28 June 2018 |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
Publisher version: | https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM18/p... |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
Keywords: | Web archiving;Twitter;Reddit;4chan;Gab;ad revenue;information ecosystem |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10046467 |
Archive Staff Only
![]() |
View Item |