Category / Twitter

by Edward Champion

Why The Onion Must Be Held Accountable for Its Vile Tweet

On Sunday night, The Onion broke the rules of edgy comedy. Why then isn’t the magazine coming to terms with its mistake?

(2/25/2013 11:50 AM UPDATE: As Jim Romenesko reported, The Onion has issued an apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

During last night’s Academy Awards, The Onion, a well-known satirical newspaper operating in Chicago, decided to row its barge into choppy waters. The Onion called Quvenzhane Wallis, a nine-year-old actress nominated for her performance in Beasts of the Southern Wild, a “cunt” on its Twitter feed:

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In less than 140 characters, The Onion betrayed and violated 25 years of satirical good will. For unless you are a sociopath, there is nothing funny about calling a child a “cunt” — especially when there isn’t any additional context to the purported “joke.” It’s possible that the tweet was meant to mimic some of Academy Award host Seth MacFarlane’s misogynist misfires such as the insinuation that Wallis would be ready for George Clooney in sixteen years. Still, if one doesn’t apply a modest dose of narrative artistry, a joke falls dead in the moraine. And it was this vital part of comedy that was clearly ignored by the nameless person at The Onion who concocted the tweet. Because of this, the tweet became nothing less than thoughtless hatred, an act of bullying where a Twitter feed with a very large pull used its power (4.7 million followers) to attack someone verbally.

Here’s what the Onion failed to do: When Hustler published a fake Campari ad of Jerry Falwell on the inside front cover of its November 1983 issue, the descriptive details were reasonable enough to be considered fabricated and absurd. A fictitious interviewer asked a fictitious Falwell about his “first time” and the result was a clearly ridiculous incestuous affair in an outhouse. Falwell sued, but he wasn’t able to win. Because the humorist behind the parody performed the basic professional duty of supplying a narrative. And because of these vital details, all clearly wrong and all clearly part of a joke, Hustler won an unanimous verdict from the Supreme Court.

Until last night, The Onion had maintained a commendable comedy reputation with narratives along these lines, although The Onion had been pushing the envelope more in recent months. One reads, for example, this commentary from “Joe Hundley” — a piece that the Onion‘s defenders (nearly all of them male) offered to those appalled by the tweet. But the reader immediately understands the irony of professed victimhood behind the act. Unlike the tweet, it is not mere invective, although there is unpleasant language conveyed for the sake of verisimilitude. Nor are any of the supporting characters in the story real figures. Whether you find Joe Hundley’s commentary funny or not, the piece takes on the qualities of Hustler‘s Campari parody and is defensible.

The Onion‘s tweet was especially troubling because the newspaper courts a largely male demographic, with 48% of its readership making $75,000/year or more, and there is undeniably privilege when a newspaper with a largely white, male, and affluent audience with just under 5 million followers on its Twitter feed picks on an African-American girl who is the daughter of a teacher and a truck driver.

As of early Monday morning, the offending tweet had been deleted from The Onion‘s Twitter feed. There was no acknowledgment in the Onion‘s Twitter feed that the tweet had been deleted, and there was no apology on the Onion‘s Twitter feed or its website. But there was a lot of understandable bile.

Now I don’t wish to suggest that the word “cunt” be prohibited from public speech. However, those who elect to use it in public dialogue need to understand the implications of the word, especially when it is directed at children. There’s a world of difference between what The Onion did last night and how George Carlin’s famous routine used “cunt.” Carlin was careful to illustrate the meaning of “cunt” and six other words. He was not using it to insult people, although people were insulted by his demystification of “cunt.”

But if someone is going to use “cunt” for hateful purposes — and there is truly no other interpretation of the Onion‘s tweet, whether the hatred was intended or not — then the organization or individual which employs such usage needs to be held accountable. As Gawker‘s Camille Dodero exposed last week in horrific detail, bullies with a power base can make an innocent person’s life quite miserable. Could not the Onion tweet, ratcheted up by others with too much time on their hands, be used to similarly hurt Quvenzhane Wallis? We take the risk every time we send something out into the universe, but sometimes we need a bit of forethought.

On Sunday evening, I put forth the proposition on Twitter that anyone who worked for The Onion and The A.V. Club, a print edition bundled with The Onion, should be held accountable for this tweet.

I called out members of The A.V. Club. Scott Tobias, film editor of The A.V. Club, claimed that because he and his writers do not write for the Twitter feed, they should neither consider the impact nor be held accountable for what their employer does. TV Editor Todd VanDerWerff, said that he “had literally nothing to do with the Onion.” I asked a point blank question to both Tobias and VandDerWerff:

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VanDerWerff replied with a fairly straightforward answer and explained that he has no regular contact with The Onion, which I thought at the time to be a fair and reasonable reply, until I checked his LinkedIn page and discovered this among his job duties:

Planned TV coverage with a freelance staff of several dozen. Editing that coverage. Wrote 10-15 pieces per week.

No contact with the Onion at all while managing several dozen freelancers? Really?

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However, the other striking aspect about VanDerWerff’s reply is that he had the decency to offer a direct answer to my question.

Tobias did not.

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As a film editor, Tobias almost certainly coordinates with people who work at The Onion. But he suggests in this tweet that The A.V. Club, a print supplement that is bundled with The Onion not unlike a newspaper section, is a publication that is as discrete as a separate magazine. This is misleading. One does not typically get Entertainment Weekly folded into an issue of Time. Nor is The Onion on the level of Time Warner. Time Warner employs 32,000 people. It is believed that Onion, Inc. employs 70.

I pointed out to Tobias that he was quite obligated to the company that signed his paychecks. Unlike VanDerWerff, he could not put himself on the line and respond with a firm position. He finally did answer my question, but his response is quite telling.

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So let’s break this down. Despite the fact that he works with people at The Onion, he is “not responsible.” In other words, Tobias has such lackadaisical journalistic standards that he could not care less about how the tone set by one part of The Onion (in this case, the Twitter feed) affects the section he edits.

Now it’s possible that I’m applying too much institutional value to The Onion‘s operation. But when I was on staff at a computer magazine, I learned very quickly the degree to which other editors and executives put pressure on you to adhere to the magazine’s standards and principles. As an articulated example of this, you can look no further than the very clear ethos adopted by The New York Times:

The company and its units believe beyond question that our staff shares the values these guidelines are intended to protect. Ordinarily, past differences of view over applying these values have been resolved amiably through discussion. The company has every reason to believe that such a pattern will continue. Nevertheless, the company views any intentional violation of these rules as a serious offense that may lead to disciplinary action, potentially including dismissal, subject to the terms of any applicable collective bargaining agreement.

Tobias doesn’t appear interested in such guidelines (if, indeed, any are in place), much less having a discussion about how an Onion staffer’s misogynistic breach might affect his operation. He’s “not responsible.” That’s how little he cares about The Onion and that’s how little he cares about the right tone.

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As Laurie Penny argued in November 2011, “If we want to build a truly fair and vibrant community of political debate and social exchange, online and offline, it’s not enough to ignore harassment of women, LGBT people or people of colour who dare to have opinions.” And it’s this unthinking idea of “not taking responsibility” and not taking a stand that allows casual misogyny to perpetuate. It is Tobias’s refusal to address challenges and this need to get approval from the people who already like him which kill the dialogue.

I’d like to think that The Onion and Tobias were better than this. I’d like to believe that they have it within them to do some soul-searching on what this failed joke really means for the work they do. But as long as The Onion circles the wagons, they’ll remain part of the problem that won’t go away, no matter how much they try to ignore it.

2/25/2013 11:50 AM UPDATE: As Jim Romenesko reported, The Onion has issued an apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:

No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire.

The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.

In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible.

Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

by Edward Champion

Why the Block Button Encourages Fear and Threatens Community

This 2,000 word essay examines the problematic impact of the block button and asks why we haven’t learned valuable lessons from community moderation in learning how to get along.

[2021 UPDATE: I have since recanted this position. But I leave this essay up for any dubious historical value it may hold.]

On Monday night, I discovered quite by accident that a midlist author had blocked me on Twitter. Not unfollowed, but blocked. This had come after nearly a year and a half of mutual help and steady correspondence. In recent months, this author confided to me about his problems. I made several gestures to meet up with the author on his next trip into the city so that we could talk about this in person. I believed in his talent. I knew a few people who could help him out.

After I had interviewed the author before an audience, we pledged a get together. He didn’t respond for weeks. He had secured what he needed. Now I could be dropped. It was probably impetuous of me to conclude this, much less assume that the author was capable of responding to email or even following up on his many pledges while on the road. On the evening that the author next rode into town, the two of us exchanged hostile words through that woefully unsubtle and impulsive form of communication known as email banged out on smartphone keyboards. Neither of us came across very well. Shortly after this, the author’s wife, who had a much wiser head about the way men emote than the two foolhardy men here in question, sent a diplomatic email trying to find out what happened. I thanked her for her email and explained my frustrations, apologizing for my part in the exchange, and pledged a cooling off period. Weeks later, I discovered that the author had blocked me on Twitter. He had also blocked my longtime partner, who had no role in the dispute whatsoever.

I know that I behaved badly and the reasonable email from the author’s wife helped me arrive at that conclusion. I also recognize that nobody is under any obligation to follow anybody. But isn’t blocking over the top? Pushing the online world’s answer to the big red button is something one reserves for a cyberstalker, a full-bore troll, a spammer, or a truly dangerous individual, not a former acquaintance that you had a vitriolic spat with.

Yet the power to block people on social media over pedantic offenses has encouraged many otherwise sharp blades to push down their capacity for tolerance and ratchet up the fear. It’s a remarkably contemptuous response to the paradoxical nature of existence. For who among us hasn’t uttered rash words or muttered moronic quips? The block button is free speech’s answer to the gun-toting libertarian who holes up in his bunker, claiming that he doesn’t need government services to put out the fires or stop crime or service the highways or take out the trash or maintain the sewers. It is an ideal that sounds noble in theory, but is precipitous in practice. As Jacob Silverman argued in Slate back in August, offense or disagreement doesn’t have to be toxic.

In writing this essay, I don’t wish to make the same mistakes that New York‘s Nathan Heller did two weeks ago, approaching this complicated subject from a privileged and blinkered position. Back in May, Richard Cooper pointed out how Twitter media bigshots shut down their critics. This was followed in October by a lengthy post from Neil Bomb’d about how comedians employed their fans to bully detractors in numbers. This week, Chris Brown and his followers attacked Jenny Johnson on Twitter with deeply misogynist remarks. There are also Laurie Penny’s ongoing reports about the sexual bullying of women and girls online, the IDF’s recent aggressive use of Twitter to foment ideological conflict, and sites which pilfer pictures from social media in the name of scummy extortion.

The block button is the very instrument which has permitted these many unpleasant online conflagrations to flourish. It is a poor and inefficient mechanism that has deigned to place judgment in the hands of the users, but that has mostly encouraged our worst instincts and clearly not learned from history. It was the hideous phrase “blocked for stupidity” which attracted Cooper’s notice. Bomb’d reports that a user named MissSpidey tried to report abusive users to seek understandable redress. She became suspended from Twitter for “aggressive blocking.” Not only does the block button incite users to feel anger and retaliate when on the receiving end, but it can’t even be properly used in its native mode.

I believe that getting beyond all this will involve either extirpating the block button from our social media interfaces or resorting to more enduring human qualities that don’t require any particular software platform. As I noted back in August, it isn’t an epidemic of niceness that’s the problem, but a paucity of kindness and respect. If we can stop erecting massive edifices that get in the way of conversations and we learn from the free flow that has permitted a thousand cat videos and a million animated GIFs to bloom, there’s a chance of improving how we communicate.

* * *

Before the block button granted every individual the power to stub out any vaguely offensive viewpoint from a timeline, there were comment moderators. The comment moderator had the thankless yet invaluable duty of sifting through tens of thousands of comments each month in an online forum, flagging highly offensive or disruptive remarks that went over the line. Not only did this system create a third party that arbitrated disputes and explicated motivations in a respectful and relatively neutral tone, but it permitted users and moderators alike to strike an acceptable compromise between preserving distinct voices and perpetuating a healthy community.

Lessons from 11 years of community (my SXSW 2011 talk) from Matt Haughey on Vimeo.

In a video adapted from his 2011 SXSW talk, Metafilter founder Matt Haughey smartly outlines some vital maxims he learned during eleven successful years of community moderation. He suggests that community moderators refrain from being overprotective. “I mean, we’ve come to the conclusion,” says Haughey at the 4:15 mark, “you know, putting up barriers when necessary, only after they’ve been permissive for years and years. And I like to think of this as a concert. You know, you don’t want your security at the front, between the band and the crowd, pushing the crowd back. That’s not really what you want moderators to be. You want them to be kind of part of it. Participants in it.” Haughey also mentions in the video that the burnout emerging from constant complaints from users causes moderators to turn into bad cops, losing sight of the initial reasons why they organized the community in the first place. Haughey also says it’s helpful to give users a forum to vent and offer feedback.

But as comment moderating power has shifted from third party mediators to individual users, the distinctions that retired community moderator Elliot Guest observed between someone who deviates from the accepted norm, someone who hasn’t read the full context and who enjoys tossing out acronyms like “tl:dr,” and someone who sets out to instigate chaos for chaos’s sake have become mangled. As individual users block with their emotions, anyone even remotely belligerent becomes a troll. Negative feelings perpetuate additional negative feelings. And instead of a thriving democracy, online community deteriorates into little more than a collection of volatile city-states perpetually at war with each other.

It didn’t help when many of the Web’s rosy pioneers encouraged the block button as it became a more prominent part of online existence. In 2010, Derek Powazek wrote:

I propose that blocking people on sites like Twitter or Flickr should not be interpreted as an insult. I propose that it’s simply taking yourself out of someone else’s attention stream.

If I block you on Twitter, my tweets no longer show up in your timeline. If I block you on Flickr, my photos no longer show up on your contacts page. In these settings, this is the only way for me to remove myself from your attention.

Not an insult? With all due respect, what could be more egomaniacal than Powazek’s “one strike” policy?

If you post a tweet that bothers me for any reason, no matter how small or petty, it’s extremely likely that you’ll do it again. It’s so likely, in fact, that I’m going to save myself the annoyance and just unfollow you now. After all, you’re not on My List of People I Must Be Okay With, and I’m not on yours. I’m just choosing to have one less brief annoyance in my day.

I’m bothered by all of this, but it would never occur to me to put Powazek on the same level as George Lincoln Rockwell. That’s as preposterous as forcing some drunken lout in a bar to vanish into thin air using a Samsung Galaxy and a pair of chopsticks. It’s simply beyond the laws of real world physics, yet faith in online simulacra has us thinking we can bend the rules. Well, it didn’t work for gamification advocates like Jane McGonigal and it won’t work for social media. The human spirit is too muscular and manifold to be packed into a digital valise.

Moreover, the willingness to write off some figure who tells us something we don’t want to hear, and to do this over a mere 140 character message, is nothing less than an irrational and unhealthy fear which fails to account for the distinct possibility that there may be some positive quality contained within the petty annoyances. It is a declaration against outside-the-box thinking, representing a growing incapacity to reckon with vital human realities or topics we may need to think about.

Nobody wants to be told, for example, that the global temperature could rise by 4 degrees Celsius as early as 2060, but it’s a very real consideration that even a neoliberal organization like The World Bank has warned against. Suppose that something like this or, for those who still think climate change is a hoax, the indisputable scientific fact that the carbon atom has six electrons is a petty annoyance for someone like Powazek.

At this point, the common fantasy expressed on Facebook and Formspring of being able to block people in real life takes on a more sinister and anti-intellectual quality. It becomes no different from a creationist attempting to block Darwin from being taught in the classrooms or an NYPD sketch artist resorting to racist stereotypes because he has blocked out the possibility that a suspect who killed three Brooklyn shopkeepers is some guy with a moustache. Perhaps most perniciously, it has the result of reducing thoughtful adults to oversensitive sixth graders plugging fingers in their ears and barking “La! La! La! I can’t hear you!” at every opportunity.

I’d like to think that most people, including the author I described at the beginning and me, are better than this. Online culture is disastrous in accepting people’s faults. It encourages a scorched earth mentality with a single click. What would happen if the people we disliked were allowed in our timelines? Perhaps if other people we trusted were retweeting and referencing these debauched or hopeless souls, we might reconsider our opinion. We might come to know them better, or at least as well as online communication will allow. We might see, as we often do when hanging out with somebody in real life, that one’s time on this earth is too short to roll out the howitzer over something small or petty. Kurt Vonnegut once suggested that the most daring thing for young people to do “is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” I can’t think of a more deliberate cancer to court than blocking somebody over a stupid tweet. But until someone comes up with a better idea to manage the trolls, the button remains irresistible.

by Edward Champion

Hurricane Sandy: The Right to Yell Flood in a Crowded Twitter and Why Peter Vallone Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About

Twitter was instrumental in conveying information during Hurricane Sandy, but free speech is too important to criminalize the trolls.

As Hurricane Sandy ravaged a vast swath of the Northeast on Monday night, a hedge fund analyst and conservative troll named Shashank Tripathi was spreading misinformation on Twitter under the handle @comfortablysmug.

In a barrage of tweets all beginning with the mealy allcaps cry BREAKING, Tripathi claimed that Con Ed was shutting down all power in Manhattan, suggested that Governor Cuomo had been trapped in Manhattan, and declared that the New York Stock Exchange was flooded.

While many authorities and journalists swiftly corrected Tripathi’s pathological lies (including Con Ed’s official Twitter account), Tripathi’s 140 character dispatches were retweeted and favorited by enough people to become a problem. Gullible media professionals like CNN meteorologist Chad Myers and The Weather Channel’s Bryan Norcross reported the NYSE prevarication as truth. Tripathi’s true identity was exposed by BuzzFeed’s Jack Stuef. Not long after, a vocal lynch mob formed sharp pitchforks with their tongues. Tripathi offered an apology on Tuesday night after many hours of silence.

Tripathi’s deceitful tweets have led to a vibrant discussion on how Twitter works as a medium. While many television reporters opted for the aesthetic allure of standing in a flooded area with tall boots and flapping windbreakers, Twitter proved an invaluable and more constructive medium to seek out and confirm leads. People who lived in devastated areas were understandably keen to communicate what was happening, with the information promulgated at a swift and unprecedented rate. As the storm crept its way past the coastline, users were uploaded ten pictures per second to Instagram. Over the course of 21 hours, there were more than 1.1 million Twitter mentions with the word “hurricane.” Of course, it is a universal truth that a hungry Internet in want of more information will invent what it can to cope.

https://twitter.com/AHurricaneSandy/status/262736402075246592

The misinformation spread through text was matched by misinformation in imagery, with The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal establishing an online forum to distinguish true photos from the doctored ones. Such resources as Madrigal’s page demonstrated how false information could be equally combated with a healthy dose of skepticism and a small amount of research.

New York City Councilman Peter Vallone wants to put a stop to all this. On Tuesday night, he announced that he wants to seek criminal charges against Tripathi. But why stop there? Does not CNN and The Weather Channel also bear some responsibility for failing to corroborate Tripathi’s tweets? Furthermore, should not free speech extend to a fake storm’s declaration of wanton corporate destruction?

But we really don’t need to dabble in silly rhetoric. Because Vallone doesn’t quite understand the way the law works. Oddly enough, much like Tripathi, Vallone prefers speculative sentiment and attention over the facts. And while Vallone has every right to tweet what he wants, he is regrettably not as amusing as a pumpkin spice hurricane.

The common parallel being trotted out is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous opinion in Schenck v. United States, in which he noted that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” This condition created a “clear and present danger” limitation in American free speech which endured for fifty years. Yet the “danger” inspired by Tripathi’s trolling was quickly stubbed out by authorities and journalists who reacted and corrected and rightfully questioned the source.

Vallone offers the “fire in a crowded theater” example in his remarks to Buzzfeed. But this is incorrect, reflecting a paraphrased standard of Holmes’s opinion that was replaced in 1969. If one shuttles forward to the “imminent lawless action” standard established with the Brandenberg v. Ohio ruling, Tripathi’s tweets become even more difficult to criminalize. As First Amendment Scholar David L. Hudson, Jr. noted on the fortieth anniversary of Brandenberg, imminent lawless action did not apply in NAACP vs. Claiborne Hardware Co. when a NAACP field secretary threatened violence against those who refused to boycott white businesses. Moreover, in Rice v. Paladin Press (1997), the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of a publisher to print a manual on how to kill people. Tripathi didn’t go nearly as far as either of these cases.

The problem resides with belief culture and the ongoing erosion of journalistic standards. We’ve seen examples of this with ABC News’s misreporting in the Aurora shooting and Tony Scott’s death, as well as CNN and Fox News announcing the wrong Obamacare verdict in June. If Tripathi must be tarred and feathered by wild-eyed councilmen from Queens who don’t understand free speech law, then we must also extend the batshit vigilante impulse to CNN’s Chad Myers and The Weather Channel’s Bryan Norcross, who were just as culpable in spreading misinformation.

I’d like to propose a saner and more reasonable alternative. Instead of seeking a scapegoat to drown in the Gowanus Canal without a fair trial, why not educate the public in critical thinking? If the information is wrong, it should not matter whether it emerges from a troll or a CNN anchor. Why not trust the people to distinguish between outright lies and hard facts? Common sense pulled the Northeast through the largest storm ever recorded. It can also defeat the online trolls, whether they are hedge fund analysts with too much time on their hands or Queens councilmen who prefer spewing ignorant drivel over community leadership.

by Edward Champion

Is the New York Times Banning “Tweet” in the Newsroom?

This morning, The Awl‘s Choire Sicha reported that New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett had issued a memo to the newsroom suggesting that “tweet” (that verb used to refer to the act of posting on Twitter) was being actively discouraged within the Gray Lady’s mighty halls. The memo, which announced that “‘tweet’ has not yet achieved the status of standard English” went on to express dismay about “tweet” being used as a noun or verb. How could a word — reflecting a colloquialism, a negologism, or jargon — ever be used in a serious newspaper? Corbett advised using the staid “say” or the vanilla “write” as a surrogate.

Rumors then began to circulate on Twitter — in part, promulgated by The Awl — that the Times was banning the use of “tweet” entirely. New York Times Artsbeat blogger Dave Itzkoff was the first to declare that the ban was not true. Yet there remained the matter of confirming the memo’s veracity.

I contacted Corbett, and he confirmed that the memo published by The Awl had indeed been disseminated around The New York Times. “I specifically say that ‘tweet’ may be acceptable in some situations,” wrote Corbett in an email. “I’m basically urging people to view it in the category of colloquialisms, which we might use in for special effect and in contexts that call for an informal, conversational tone. But we try to minimize use of colloquial language — as well as jargon — in straight news writing.”

In other words, if a New York Times reporter is using Twitter to get a quote from a source for a big news story, the very practical notion of using “wrote” instead of “tweeted” is sound policy. But does “tweet” get an outright ban? Hardly.

by Edward Champion

Linkrot on Steroids: The Problems with URL Shorteners

As Simon Owens recently observed, tr.im — a service that shortened URLs — is now gone. The links that it once helpfully compressed are now useless. For those who may have passed on a link to a pal, tweeted a particularly helpful article, or otherwise stopped an unruly URL from breaking in two because of a monitor’s constraining width, this metadata means nothing. How long will it be before all the other URL shortening services are about as valuable as a maniac with a fetish for smearing Crisco on random monitors or some sad and anonymous man who wastes his entire weekend on the Internet pretending to be somebody else on Twitter? Twhirl, the Adobe AIR app aiding folks in posting silly thoughts and links to Twitter, presents us with digg.com, is.gd, bit.ly, snurl.com, and twurl.nl as link-shortening options, all desperately needed if anyone expects to use the 140 character limit. But will these shorteners even exist in six months? Shouldn’t the mad scientists at Twitter come up with an in-house standard to ensure some longevity? (All this, of course, assumes that our tweets, or anything we put online, is even permanent — a subject I rambled at length about last week.)

There’s also the problem of linkrot. The ever-shifting Wikipedia page suggests that Tim Berners-Lee was the first person to warn against these constantly changing links. Some extremely lazy excavation reveals that Jakob Nielsen was on the case on June 14, 1998, pointing, with unintentional and unanticipated irony, to “a recent survey by Terry Sullivan’s All Things Web.” But the link today is no longer good. I consult The Wayback Machine, waiting a few patient minutes for some hopeful snapshot of the Sullivan site in question, getting a total of 91 versions between 1998 and 2008. And of course, a click to one of these surrogate McCarthy functions takes another 40 seconds, and I don’t know which version is even the optimal one. And I find dramatic differences between the last version of the site in 2008 and the first version of the site in 1998. To name just one modification, the 2008 version reveals that the survey was conducted in April 1997. I am directed to the actual survey, which thankfully still maintains its original URL. But for how long?) There is no such date in the 1998 version. The 2008 version compares three State of the Web surveys. But what if we want to know what Terry Sullivan wrote about the original survey in 1998? The new page gives no indication that Sullivan changed the page and doesn’t address us to an older version. (I should point out that the Guardian has, And if you try and call up All Things Web in Firefox 3.5.2, you get a 403 error. What was once public is now private or “down for maintenance” (as of August 9, 2009, 9:13 PM EST). Nielsen has referenced only general details in his piece, as well as the original URL, which the patient types will attempt to extract through the Wayback Machine.

But let’s say that Nielsen had used something like tr.im to point to Sullivan. Would we be able to conduct this experiment? Instead of having 91 versions of Sullivan’s website to examine, we’d have to perform some guesswork, assuming the page was referenced by others and assuming that this was the only page in which Sullivan wrote about the “recent survey” in 1998.

Let’s also consider that all of the content and all of the links that we type into Twitter (or, for that matter, a webmail service) involves relying on a third-party website. A third-party website that has been prone to outages, lost tweets, lost followers, and lost information. What steps then is Twitter taking to ensure that all of the data generated at a historical moment is preserved? What are the URL shorteners doing to ensure that the regular versions of URLs are preserved?

Five years from now, will anyone investigating the manner in which CNN and The New York Times relied on Twitter for its news about recent events in Iran be able to check the original data that these ostensible reporters relied on? Will these reporters keep any notes they generated? Will their links still be good? Will the New York Time‘s links still be around? (Hell, will the New York Times even still be around?)

Our cavalier refusal to ask these questions only exacerbates the problem of linkrot. There are thankfully methods of backing up your Twitter data, but how many Twitter users will even do this? We are forced by necessity to shorten the links, but “abuse of the service” may cause it to be temporarily disabled. Bit.ly helpfully offers a “history” of recently shortened links. And it even tracks the URLs that you’ve recently shortened even if you’ve never signed up or signed in. But days later, the history is cleared.

Just for fun, I performed an advanced Twitter search on all uses of “bit.ly” on Twitter through February 28, 2009. “No results for bit.ly until:2009-02-28.” I know this cannot be. But let’s give Twitter the benefit of the doubt. All uses of “tinyurl” on Twitter through February 28, 2009? “No results for tinyurl until:2009-02-28.”

These search results are, as anyone who has used Twitter and URL shorteners in the past two years, outright wrong. Twitter lacks the resources to preserve our data from six months ago. How can we expect it to preserve our data six months from now? In our great rush to adopt tools of change, our failure to backup the data we’ve already generated is the Internet’s equivalent to the explosive silver nitrate film stock and reckless cataloging that has permitted only 10 to 15% of silent movies to survive, with the remainder thought to be lost forever. (And who knows if there will be some online answer to Carl Bennett?)

But then many of the prospective answers to these questions depend on how much we value the services we’re using, and just how much we’re willing to waste our weekends on a desperate effort at tenuous restitution.