Understanding Web Archiving Services and Their (Mis)Use on Social Media
Savvas Zannettou, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael, Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini

TL;DR
This paper analyzes how web archiving services like archive.is and the Wayback Machine are used and shared on social media platforms, revealing patterns of content preservation, ideological influence, and community behavior.
Contribution
It provides a large-scale analysis of web archiving usage on social media, highlighting the types of content archived and the social dynamics involved.
Findings
News and social media posts are the most archived content.
Archiving URLs are widely shared on fringe communities.
Evidence of moderation influencing link sharing to archives.
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,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsWeb Data Mining and Analysis · Caching and Content Delivery · Social Media and Politics
