The Internet’s Memory Is Fading In Front Of Us. Preserve What You Can.

With Imgur and Twitter removing "old, unused, and inactive accounts and content," it becomes apparent that the internet's memory is fading before our eyes. It emphasizes the need for us to preserve what we can.

I signed up for Facebook in my senior year of high school, just as the service was branching out from its college campus confines. And even then, in those early days, the message from my teachers, my parents, and those talking heads on TV was the same: don’t put anything on the internet that you don’t want floating around forever.

To this day, that’s good advice. But it’s also clear the internet’s memory isn’t exactly the steel trap we were all told it was.

In (what else?) a tweet posted last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said the social media service would be “purging” user accounts if they lay dormant for long enough.

The period of inactivity that would prompt an account deletion is pretty long — Musk said the move would apply to accounts that have gone unused for “...