Platforms do not preserve the information they host indefinitely.
When a platform shuts down, the records it maintained can disappear, even if references to those records remain elsewhere.
Vine was a video platform launched in 2013. It hosted millions of short videos, many of which became culturally significant. These videos were embedded in news articles, blogs, and social media posts across the web.
In 2017, Twitter shut down Vine.
The videos themselves were removed. The URLs remained. Articles still referenced Vine videos as evidence of events, trends, or cultural moments.
But the underlying records were no longer accessible.
The references persisted.
The content did not.
Without persistent infrastructure, signals cannot retain their context.
The continuity of the record becomes fragmented.