How the internet is disappearing before our eyes

The internet seems infinite, yet vast amounts of online content is vanishing, according to a new study. 

The Pew Research Center found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 "are no longer accessible a decade later" – showing "just how fleeting online content" has become in an era of "digital decay".

'Algorithms are deciding'

Most people think of the internet as a "place where content lasts forever", said The Independent, but the reality is that "vast amounts of news and important reference content are disappearing".

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The study authors said that most of these lost pages are "deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website", a practice carried out for a variety of reasons. 

Many sites are "sacrificing" old material "at the altar of Google" in a bid to benefit from search algorithms, said Simon Brew on Whynow. The Google algorithm favours fast-loading websites, and removing "thin content" allows for a quicker loading time. And while some of these pages will be "duplicated material", others will be older, genuine news articles that "algorithms are deciding" are not worth keeping.

Other reasons for shedding pages include "sizeable restructures and redesigns" in which archive material is deemed "not compatible" with new technologies.

It's not just web pages either. According to the Pew study, one in five posts on X are "no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted". Of these posts, 60% were lost because the account was made private, suspended or deleted entirely.

Feels both 'abandoned and crowded'

Many removed pages appear to be "of little immediate value to anyone", said Brew, but vast swathes of news, government and Wikipedia pages now include broken links to "important reference content".

 Amid the online proliferation of disinformation, it is becoming "harder to surface and verify information" from sources that may have previously existed, said Wired. And on social media sites such as X, a "real" sense of "platform decay" and fleeting bot-generated content is creating a "digital space that feels abandoned and crowded at once".

'A reminder to be sceptical'

There is "some fightback" to combat disappearing content from the internet, said Brew. But it is coming from non-profit archive sites that will struggle to compete with big corporations whose decisions to remove content are "determined primarily by the pursuit of the pound or dollar". 

Campaigners fear that as the "world wide web grows, it’s narrowing", and its "own active history is being removed, with not an eyebrow being batted".

The removal of that content also makes the internet a less recognisable space, one that is "no longer for humans, by humans", said academics Jake Renzella and Vlada Rozova on The Conversation. Online interactions are becoming ever more "synthetic" as AI and algorithm-generated content takes a greater hold.

The freedom for people to create and share on the internet is "what made it so powerful" in the first place, but the rapid removal of human-generated content is a "reminder to be sceptical" and to navigate the internet with a "critical mind".