38% of content on the Internet has 'disappeared' in the past 10 years

According to new research recently shared by Pew Research Center, up to 38% of content posted on the Internet on websites since 2013 no longer exists.

At the end of the study, in 2023, 8% of the content created had disappeared in just one year. This phenomenon was named "digital decay" by the authors.

Specifically, 23% of news sites have at least one broken link. The data was released by researchers after surveying more than 500 thousand pages of more than 2 thousand websites classified as news sites.

38% of content on the Internet has 'disappeared' in the past 10 years Picture 1 38% of content on the Internet has 'disappeared' in the past 10 years Picture 1

For government websites, this number is 21%. Among them, small local pages, such as district or city level, often have broken links the most. Most happen on pages with certain security modes such as https://, 6% of which are related to a certain pdf file, 16% are pointed to another URL that is not consistent with the original recorded content. head.

With free information sites like Wikipedia, the situation of broken links is much higher. 54% of the 50 thousand pages of information are broken in the References section.

The situation of digital decay is even stronger on social networks. For example, Twitter or now X nearly 1/5 of tweets are no longer set to "public" free viewing mode after just a few months. 60% of them may be due to the account owner being locked, deleted or converted to private mode. The remaining 40% are account owners who delete their posts themselves.

More specifically, 1% of tweets are deleted immediately after 1 hour of posting, 3% are deleted after 1 day, 10% are deleted after 1 week and 15% are deleted after 1 month.

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