A new study has found that websites and online content are gradually disappearing, causing the internet itself to slowly vanish. Many of us think of the internet as a place where content lasts forever. But according to new research, a significant portion of websites are disappearing or being relocated, resulting in the loss of a huge amount of content.
For example, 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 are now gone. Even newer pages are disappearing: 8% of the pages that were online in 2023 are no longer accessible.
Research by the Pew Research Center shows that these pages usually disappear or become inaccessible when they are deleted or moved. This leads to the loss of a tremendous amount of news and important reference content. The study found that 23% of news pages and 21% of government websites have at least one broken link that no longer works. Wikipedia pages include such non-existent links in 54% of their references. This report, titled “When Online Content Disappears,” has been published on the Pew Research Center website.
The same thing is happening on social media. Within just a few months of posting, one-fifth of all tweets on Twitter vanish from the site. Research shows that 25% of all pages collected between 2013 and 2023 are no longer online.
The same is true for content from Bangladesh. The majority of blog sites and online magazines for Bengali speakers are now gone or are disappearing. Therefore, it is impossible to ignore the data from the Pew Research Center’s study.
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