Archiving the Covid-19 pandemic

Social media is a potential source of archive material. It's a useful medium for recording the thoughts, opinions and discussions of all kinds of communities. It's likely to become a valuable resource for researchers as it creates a cultural record of life in the 21st Century.

Over the past couple of years, social media has been a vital tool for communities. It has helped people to keep in touch, organise mutual aid groups, and share information about issues surrounding the pandemic. You might like to consider some of this material for your Covid collection. A lot of this material is in the public realm, so you can access it yourself. This gives you a lot of control, but also a lot of the responsibility for collecting it responsibly and appropriately.

What is social media?

The huge variety of services currently available present a challenge in creating a strong definition, but there are some common features that make something 'social media':

• The medium is web-based
• The content is user-generated — including text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and usage data
• Users create service-specific profiles on the website or app, which itself is designed and maintained by the social media organisation
• The medium enables the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups

Why archive social media?

Social media allows information to be shared in an informal way. They let members of the public communicate with each other, and with organisations, in a public space. Like community archives themselves, social media gives a voice to those who might not otherwise be heard.

However, like all digital media, Social Media content is extremely vulnerable to loss:

• There are no legal requirements for a social media platform to preserve its content
• There are often changes in platform policy and ownership - platforms often shut down, for example Vine and GeoCities
• It is expensive for platforms to curate and store this data

Beyond this, some platforms advertise on the basis of the short-lived and untraceable nature of their content. They are actively trying to avoid being archived, so a question exists around the appropriacy of saving material from them.

Social Media in the Pandemic

Social media became increasingly important during a time when people had to socially distance and limit their contact with other people. These platforms are designed for people to communicate over distance and helped the world to remain connected. This means that usage greatly increased because of the pandemic.

Various people, political groups and health organisations have used social media during the pandemic to:

• Keep in touch with each other
• Spread information
• Share pandemic related information quickly to lots of people

But social media can also be risky. Direct access to content through platforms such as Twitter and YouTube leave users vulnerable to 'fake news'. This information can strongly influence the beliefs and behaviours of people. It has caused division in society and its responses to the pandemic, for example in the growth of conspiracy theories around vaccinations and lockdowns.

That makes it important to archive this information in the same way as your other pandemic records. Social media can be deleted easily, or you can be overwhelmed by how much there is to save. If you can capture a certain amount of it, however, you can provide a snapshot to future generations of how people from your particular community reacted to the pandemic, and their thoughts, concerns and behaviours. Social media helps you capture the voices of ordinary people.