Using Internet Archive / Wayback Machine for investigations

YouTube

Internet Archive does a little better with YouTube.  You can type in a specific video and track if the video has changed, or if there were some “comments” made in the past that were deleted or no longer there today.

twinkle archive 2012-01-01

Above is the archived page for a popular YouTube video from Jan. 1, 2012.  Surprisingly, the video works, and is streamed through JWPlayer, some sort of simulation of the original YouTube video player.  You can move forwards or backwards in time by selecting the controls along the top of the page.  If you want to fine-tune you can use the left or right arrows to move to the next archived version.  Sometimes Wayback Machine can have a few different versions of the page in the same day.

twinkle archive 2012-11-27

Here is the same video archived on Nov. 27, 2012, you can see that the number of hits has gone up and more comments are there to browse through.

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