- [ ] Check Archives ### Explanation Information in social media is changing: you can remove post, change your name and photo, remove account or to close it from public access. Archived versions of webpages allow us to retrieve historical or deleted information from social media platforms that is no longer available in its original form. This technique works effectively due to human behavioural tendency to ignore the persistence of digital data. People often assume that once content is deleted or modified on social media, it is gone forever. However, various archival tools can retrieve these supposedly 'lost' digital footprints, making copies in advance or using some internal social media platform APIs. The most simple technique to get an archived copy of a page - use Google or another search engine to see a cached version of a page. Some platforms support partially disclosure of removed / changed content (Instagram showed username history before), mostly to fight with fraud. But this is a difficult compromise, since it contradicts the users' rights to provide information about their self in the form intended. ### Input - URLs of social media posts or profiles - Screenshots or references to deleted or altered content ### Output - Archived versions of web pages or social media posts - Historical changes in social media profiles or pages (text diff, list of previous usernames) ### Examples - [OSINT on Deleted Content](https://www.osintcurio.us/2019/02/12/osint-on-deleted-content/index.htm) - [Tracking previous usernames of an Instagram account](https://apostrophe.ua/ua/news/world/ex-ussr/2019-02-17/perekupil-nogotochki-kadyirov-sotvoril-chudo-v-instagram/154552) ### Tools - [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/) - [Archive.today](https://archive.ph/) - [Wayback Tweets](https://waybacktweets.streamlit.app/) - [Quick Cache and Archive search by Cyber Detective](https://cipher387.github.io/quickcacheandarchivesearch/) ### Types - **behavioural**: people tend to save data to have historical information and be able to user it later ### See also - {{internal links to similar techniques}} ### Weakness [[SOWEL-7. Copying Content]]