Community Notes (formerly named “Birdwatch”) is Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking program to combat mis- and dis-information. By signing up to be a Birdwatch contributor, a user can add contextual notes and commentary to other tweets as well as rate the contributions of others. User submissions to the Community Notes program also serve as metacommentary on the platform more generally. Beyond their fact-checking role, Birdwatch notes also illuminate how some users perceived Elon Musk’s recent purchase of the platform and how the subsequent changes aligned with their own understandings of what the platform ought to be.

This paper describes Birdwatch Archive, a project to archive Twitter’s Community Notes program by parsing the data that Twitter publicly releases from the Birdwatch program and displaying it in a searchable and organized fashion that is accessible and useful to researchers. Using the anonymous user identification strings from each TSV file, the website enables researchers to assess how frequently users contribute to the Community Notes program by grouping notes and ratings they have provided.

Even as Twitter continues to devolve and collapse, we can try to learn from how users described and understood the platform. When studying major platforms, we cannot rely solely upon the data made accessible by the platform itself. Instead, we must look for opportunities to create “rogue archives” of online settings, which includes turning sources that are not as frequently viewed by most users.

Li Wenliang, an eye doctor at Wuhan Central hospital and one of the first to raise alarm about the outbreak of COVID-19, was summoned by the local police and forced to sign a statement reprimanding his message as a groundless rumor as well as a disturbance to the public order in late December 2019. Two months later, Li died after contracting COVID-19 at his workplace, aged 33 years. This caused shock and outrage across China and Li’s Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) homepage soon became an online “wailing wall,” where people mourned, condoled, and commemorated the whistleblower and complained, questioned, and protested the overstrict government policies relevant to COVID-19 pandemic. This study shows that Weibo offers a place for users to see the mundane life of Li Wenliang, express grief and frustration, and interact with each other to remember Li, whereas another super-powerful Chinese social media, WeChat, allows users to synthesize information about Li, provide analysis and criticism, and circulate the memory of Li through their social networks. Together, these two platforms helped stabilize Chinese internet users’ memory of Li as a whistleblower, a civilian hero, a martyr, and a supporter of free speech and diverse voices, distinguished from the official version. This study contributes to recent scholarly interest in understanding how the technological affordances of social media shape memory work. It also shows that even in a politically constrictive environment, such as China’s media ecology, the space for questioning and protesting still exists, though more nuanced and precarious.

Over time, technocultural discourses around death have shifted from a focus on immortality (e.g, cryogenics) to the pragmatics of death in postdigital life. But if immortality is not the end goal for consumer-facing tech industries, what is? The digital afterlife industry (DAI) has emerged as a range of platformized services to manage the expired organic body as data. This paper extends established scholarly conversations by reframing the rise of the DAI explicitly through the problem of mortality as a solutionist practice. The glut of legacy avatars and digital executors now available are symptomatic of longevity and obsolescence braided together in an approach to posthuman life as a service for the living.

First, I argue that the commercialization of death as the “digital beyond” is a convergence of the overproduction of personal data, a global pandemic, and born-digital aging populations. I further argue for seeing the build-up of the DAI as an intersection of mundane software and datafied care that works to extend, suspend, and/or close the relationship between the living and the dead. Second, I apply the walkthrough method to two afterlife applications and their promotional surround, HereAfter A.I. and Empathy. These apps demonstrate different approaches to the 'digital beyond' as closure, but in both, software becomes the digital heir.

By 'revolutionizing death,' I articulate the fundamental change in a technocultural relationship to death to better fit a postcapitalist logic of "care" practices that are embedded in closure as a new mode of attending to platforms and their sustainability needs.

In the world of web archiving, a peculiar technical problem can result from the automated processes of web crawling bots: the leakage of live content into archived web “snapshots” (also called “mementos”). Programmers and web engineers refer to these files as “zombie resources” because users of platforms like The Wayback Machine or Memento expect web snapshots to be archived (“dead”) historical files available to “replay” the web of the past on demand; instead, they are compromised by code (usually JavaScript) that reaches into the current “live web” for content that is then plugged into the web snapshot. Using the concept of the figure as a critical and methodological device, this paper turns to the zombie in networked computing, specifically web archiving projects, in order to illuminate contemporary cultural anxieties around digital preservation and the perseverance of networked resources, but also more broadly, around the problem of fixing the past in relation to the present.

Examining technical documentation, developer blog posts, and web APIs like ServiceWorker and Reconstructive that are designed to prevent live-leaks, this paper figures zombies as more than just technical problems. In popular culture and online, zombies shore up and challenge boundaries around life and death, liveness and the record, vitality and waste, contingency and the archive. They are tangled up in the politics of citation and the production of historical knowledge and therefore lay bare some of the most important questions of preservation, access, authenticity, truth, trust and evidence in the digital age.