“THIS TWEET IS UNAVAILABLE”: #BLACKLIVESMATTER TWEETS DECAY

Abstract

Previous studies show that random tweet collections that include more than one hashtag had relatively low rate of unavailable tweets while political related datasets have a higher rate of tweet decay (Almuhimedi et al., 2013; Bastos, 2021; Bhattacharya & Ganguly, 2016; McCammon, 2022; Zubiaga, 2018). For example, Zubiaga’s (2018) study indicates that 81.4% of their 30 randomly selected real-world events datasets remained available after 4 years, while Bastos’ (2021) study shows that only 67% of Brexit debate related tweets were available after the same amount of time. Our preliminary study looks at the #BlackLivesMatter discussion on Twitter and we find that only 63% tweets remain available after 2 years, which is significantly higher compared to the previous studies. This preliminary work adds to the existing literature in two keyways. First, we broaden the kinds of discussion spaces where information decay has been studied by focusing on #BlackLivesMatter (hereafter, BLM), which in the U.S. has become a highly politicized movement (Stewart et al., 2018). Second, to our best knowledge, this is the first study looking at social movement tweets since Musk took over and it may highlight how the landscape on Twitter has shifted.