Michael L. Nelson

Screenshots of social media posts are a common approach for information sharing. Unfortunately, before sharing a screenshot, users rarely verify whether the attribution of the post is fake or real. There are numerous legitimate reasons to share screenshots. However, sharing screenshots of social media posts is also a vector for mis-/disinformation spread on social media. We are exploring methods to verify the attribution of a social media post shown in a screenshot, using resources found on the live web and in web archives. We focus on the use of web archives, since the attribution of non-deleted posts can be relatively easily verified using the live web. We show how information from a Twitter screenshot (Twitter handle, timestamp, and tweet text) can be extracted and used for locating potential archived tweets in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. We evaluate our method on a dataset of 1,571 single tweet screenshots.

We document strategies and lessons learned from sampling the web by collecting 27.3 million URLs with 3.8 billion archived pages spanning 26 years (1996-2021) from the Internet Archive's (IA) Wayback Machine. Our goal is to revisit fundamental questions regarding the size, nature, and prevalence of the publicly archivable web, in particular, to reconsider the question: "How long does a web page last?" Addressing this question requires obtaining a sample of the web. We proposed several dimensions to sample URLs from the Wayback Machine's holdings: time of first archive, HTML vs. other MIME types, URL depth (top-level pages vs. deep links), and top-level domain (TLD). We sampled 285 million URLs from IA's ZipNum index file, which contains every 6000th line of the CDX index. These indexes also include URLs of embedded resources such as images, CSS, and JavaScript. To limit our sample to "web pages" (i.e., pages intended for human interaction), we filtered for likely HTML pages based on filename extension. We then queried IA's CDX API to determine the time of first capture and MIME type of each URL. We grouped 92 million text/html URLs based on year of first capture. Archiving speed and capacity have increased over time, so we found more URLs archived in later years. To counter this, we extracted top-level URLs from deep links to upsample earlier years. Our target was 1 million URLs per year, but due to sparseness during 1996-2021, we clustered those years, collecting 1.2 million URLs for that range. Popular domains like Yahoo and Twitter were over-represented, so we performed logarithmic-scale downsampling. Our final dataset contains TimeMaps of 27.3 million URLs, comprising 3.8 billion archived pages. We convey lessons learned from sampling the archived web to inform future studies.

The UPS Prototype was a proof-of-concept web portal built in preparation for the Universal Preprint Service Meeting held in October 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The portal provided search functionality for a set of metadata records that had been aggregated from a range of repositories that hosted preprints, working papers, and technical reports. Every search result was overlaid with a dynamically generated menu, called an SFX-menu, that provided a selection of value-adding links for the described scholarly work. The meeting eventually led to the Open Archives Initiative and its Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which remains widely used in scholarly communication, cultural heritage, and elsewhere. The SFX-menu approach became standardized as the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services (NISO OpenURL), and compliant linking servers remain operational in academic and research libraries worldwide. Both OAI-PMH and NISO OpenURL, as well as associated systems and services, have been so widely deployed that they can be considered an integral part of the scholarly information infrastructure. The authors, who were deeply involved in devising the UPS Prototype and played core roles in the OAI-PMH and NISO OpenURL specification efforts, take the reader behind the scenes of the development of these technologies. They reveal Clifford Lynch as an invisible influencer in the establishment of scholarly information infrastructure.

The Environmental Governance and Data Initiative (EDGI) regularly crawled US federal environmental websites between 2016 and 2020 to capture changes between two presidential administrations. However, because it does not include the previous administration ending in 2008, the collection is unsuitable for answering our research question, Were the website terms deleted by the Trump administration (2017--2021) added by the Obama administration (2009--2017)? Thus, like many researchers using the Wayback Machine's holdings for historical analysis, we do not have access to a complete collection suiting our needs. To answer our research question, we must extend the EDGI collection back to January, 2008. This includes discovering relevant pages that were not included in the EDGI collection that persisted through 2020, not just going further back in time with the existing pages. We pieced together artifacts collected by various organizations for their purposes through many means (Save Page Now, Archive-It, and more) in order to curate a dataset sufficient for our intentions. In this paper, we contribute a methodology to extend existing web archive collections temporally to enable longitudinal analysis, including a dataset extended with this methodology. We use our new dataset to analyze our question, Were the website terms deleted by the Trump administration added by the Obama administration? We find that 81 percent of the pages in the dataset changed between 2008 and 2020, and that 87 percent of the pages with terms deleted by the Trump administration were terms added during the Obama administration.

Changes made to webpages can affect their retrievability. Often this is done with the intention of increasing the page's search engine ranking to improve overall access to information on the page. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) created a dataset that describes changes on US federal environmental webpages between 2016 and 2020. EDGI noted that many environmental terms were deleted from the pages, but without user data, claims that page retrievability and public information access were lowered are only anecdotal. The Open Resource for Click Analysis in Search (ORCAS) dataset was created during the same time frame, from 2017 to 2020, and enables high quality user intent analysis without compromising on user privacy protection. We present an analysis of the intersection of the EDGI dataset and the ORCAS dataset, matching changes on federal environmental webpages with their associated queries. We use web archives and a change-text indexing system to link changes in term frequency on the pages with the queries. We find that the pages contain fewer query terms in 2020 than in 2016, lowering the pages' retrievability. The analysis provides substantive support of EDGI's claim that federal environmental pages were made less accessible between 2016 and 2020.

Mis/disinformation is a common and dangerous occurrence on social media. Misattribution is a form of mis/disinformation that deals with a false claim of authorship, which means a user is claiming someone said (posted) something they never did. We discuss the difference between misinformation and disinformation and how screenshots are used to spread author misattribution on social media platforms. It is important to be able to find the original post of a screenshot to determine if the screenshot is being correctly attributed. To do this we have built several tools to aid in automating this search process. The first is a Python script that aims to categorize Twitter posts based on their structure, extract the metadata from a screenshot, and use this data to group all the posts within a screenshot together. We tested this process on 75 Twitter posts containing screenshots collected by hand to determine how well the script extracted metadata and grouped the individual posts, F1 = 0.80. The second is a series of scrapers being used to collect a dataset that can train and test a model to differentiate between various social media platforms. We collected 16,620 screenshots have been collected from Facebook, Instagram, Truth Social, and Twitter. Screenshots were taken by the scrapers of the web version and mobile version of each platform in both light and dark mode.