Adverse Effects of Twitter’s UI change on Web Archives

We examined the challenges of preserving Twitter content in web archives following Twitter’s June 2020 UI change. We found that many archives could not properly capture the new interface, leading to missing or incomplete content and potentially inaccurate historical records. Using the personal Twitter account of the 45th U.S. President, @realDonaldTrump, we identified missing evidence of misinformation labels and temporal inconsistencies in archived pages. The goal of this study is to caution the researchers to critically evaluate archived social media data before drawing historical conclusions.