The US will stop saving all the tweets in the world

The Library of Congress of the United States announces that it will be more selective and will only store those that have relevant information.

Everything that any Twitter user has said in public, however trivial, is stored for future generations in the Library of Congress. But that will change as of January 1, 2018, as the world's largest editorial archive has decided to rethink its tweet conservation strategy. Only a selection of concrete utility for the US will be safeguarded for the remains.

This decision modifies an agreement of the institution with the platform that lasted from April 2010, when both parties agreed to store everything that had been published in open since the beginning of Twitter, in 2006, and also keep what was tweeted in the future. All with the aim of preserving "a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and US citizens," according to the director of Communication of that file.

The Library of Congress of the United States kept all the public tweets issued since Twitter began to work

Among the reasons given by the Library of Congress to change its storage policy is the mutation of Twitter as a platform: first, the number of publications has been increasing over time, as more users joined and the activity grew: the 50 million daily tweets that then produced 40 million users have become more than 500 million, with a current base of 330 million users. Also, the institution indicates that the tweets are less and less useful since it only preserves text.

As the publications on Twitter have been expanding towards visual aspects such as videos, photos or animated gifs, the conservation of tweets in which the text is not self-explanatory without this multimedia content does not make much sense. Finally, the fact that Twitter doubled the character limit of its publications throughout 2017 has also changed the outlook for the Library of Congress. In 2010, the standard was 140, while today there are 280, which may imply internal logic problems in storage.

In seven years Twitter has gone from 50 to more than 500 million tweets a day\

The volumes of activity generated by Twitter present technical challenges when it comes to saving information, classifying it and making it accessible to searches. So, for now, the Library of Congress has not opened access to the collection, as it also faces difficulties such as the treatment of tweets that are eliminated by their authors and the decontextualization that this may generate in conversations or general accounts. On the other hand, the full conservation of these first 12 years of open publications of the platform is an exception for the Library of Congress, which is always selective in what it chooses to keep for posterity.

The decision made in his day corresponded with documenting the irruption of a global public conversation. "The Twitter file can be one of the most important legacies for future generations," the institution said in its statement. At the moment there is no date for these millions of tweets can be consulted by the public, waiting to "solve access problems in a sustainable and cost-efficient."