Hi all! I’m Laurel, a curator at the [Decentralised Public Library](https://www.decentralisedpubliclibrary.com/), and today I want to talk about a very relevant use case for Feedweave - recording information about the COVID-19 outbreak.
Records of your day-to-day life during times of crisis can provide valuable information to future historians. On Feedweave, your posts are immutable and permanent - no one can change them. There’s an incredible wealth of information about the COVID-19 outbreak currently online, but much of it is vulnerable.
Link rot, the phenomenon where web pages disappear, leaving behind a 404 error, is surprisingly common. On average, almost 30% of links shared on social media are [gone within two years](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-33290-6_14). Websites don’t maintain themselves - everything from a domain change to acquisition by a bigger company can cause entire sites to disappear, never to be found again.
Beyond link rot, content published on the internet is vulnerable to [censorship](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/03/china-social-media-language-government-censorship-covid/), [stealth editing](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/public-editor/liz-spayd-new-york-times-public-editor.html), [shadow banning](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/08/instagram-shadow-bans-marginalised-communities-queer-plus-sized-bodies-sexually-suggestive), and [outright deletion](https://firstmonday.org/article/view/3943/3169). One [recent example](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/business/media/coronavirus-china-journalists.html) is the loss of accurate accounts of the Coronavirus outbreak on Chinese social media platform Weibo. After the death of whistleblower [Li Wenliang](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/world/asia/china-coronavirus-doctor-death.html), Chinese censors [cracked down](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/coronavirus-chinese-rage-death-whistleblower-doctor-li-wenliang) on posts with the hashtag #IWantFreeSpeech. Weibo has notoriously been subject to censorship for years, and [anything](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306422015605724) that looks like dissent can be removed from the platform.
We can learn from the past by looking at the records people have left behind. It’s hard to get more permanent than carving something into a rock, and for hundreds of years communities in what is now the Czech Republic did just that. They placed boulders called [“hunger stones”](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258761808_Droughts_in_the_Czech_Lands_1090-2012_AD) at low points in the river Elbe exposed by drought. The message to the future was clear: if you can read this, prepare for trouble. One stone, which has inscriptions reaching back to 1417, reads “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine”; “If you see me, weep.” These hunger stones both communicate to us what these people went through, while also pointing to the [recent droughts](https://www.gdacs.org/contentdata/maps/daily/DR/1013283/ECDM_20190822_Europe_Drought.pdf) caused by our own changing climate.
Records of epidemics are also very valuable, but not just as historical artefacts. One book, [A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce pieces relating to the Last Plague in the Year 1665](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-collection-of-very-valuable-and-scarce-pieces-relating-to-the-last-plague-in-the-year-1665-1721), was intended to serve as a potential manual for what to do in the case of future outbreaks of plague.
In recent weeks, [many](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/health/coronavirus-is-very-different-from-the-spanish-flu-of-1918-heres-how.html) [news](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/be-careful-spains-last-1918-flu-survivor-offers-warning-on-coronavirus) [outlets](https://time.com/5797629/health-1918-flu-epidemic/) have looked back to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, often in an attempt to imagine what the near future will hold. The epidemic lasted over a year, and had a death toll estimated to be between 50 and 100 million - far more than the first world war.
However, the flu kept a low profile in the mind of the public. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, most people would associate the year 1918 with the end of the First World War, and not the deadliest pandemic the world has ever seen. How could such a devastating event be forgotten?
There are multiple reasons. The epidemic tore through communities quickly, killing in hours or days. National and international communication was far slower, and the global reach of the pandemic was less apparent than it is today. Finally, information about the flu was heavily censored by countries fighting in the first world war.
The Spanish flu actually received its name due to wartime censorship - the first coverage of the new influenza epidemic ripping through the cities and battlefields of Europe came from Spain, a neutral country with a free press.
While government officials and newspapers in the US and UK ignored or downplayed the seriousness of the flu, normal people took the time to write letters, diaries, and reports that let us understand their experiences. Today, it is possible to find many [primary](https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/records-list.html) [sources](https://cnu.libguides.com/diseases/flu) [online](https://www.influenzaarchive.org/index.html). Some of the most helpful documents for historians come from letters and diaries. One, from a soldier on a troop ship in the middle of an outbreak [“provides information not officially documented”](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/18/11/ad-1811_article#tnF1) on the poor conditions aboard, and the underwhelming response by military leaders. Most importantly, it “presents an independent personal perspective of this overwhelming experience.”
Feedweave can serve as a valuable tool in the effort to preserve the truth about the Covid-19 pandemic for future generations. Posts are permanent, immutable, and impossible to censor.
As we’re seeing now, governments are rolling out broad programs of surveillance and repression, taking the pandemic as an opportunity to [suppress](https://www.cjr.org/analysis/coronavirus-press-freedom-crackdown.php) critical media coverage and [promote](https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000007024807/china-coronavirus-propaganda.html) their own narratives.
The political implications of discussing the virus can make privacy an [important](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/business/wuhan-coronavirus-journalists.html) safety consideration. With Feedweave, posters have the option of either maintaining anonymity, or tying their posts to their public identity.
As we face down another epidemic, we are more empowered than we have been at any point in history to take control of our own narratives. We have the power to create the history that we want to see endure for future generations. By posting and archiving your experiences here, you can make sure that people a century from now will truly understand what happened.
**References**
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-33290-6_14
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/03/china-social-media-language-government-censorship-covid/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/public-editor/liz-spayd-new-york-times-public-editor.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/08/instagram-shadow-bans-marginalised-communities-queer-plus-sized-bodies-sexually-suggestive
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/3943/3169
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/18/11/ad-1811_article
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/business/media/coronavirus-china-journalists.html
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/coronavirus-chinese-rage-death-whistleblower-doctor-li-wenliang
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306422015605724
https://www.gdacs.org/contentdata/maps/daily/DR/1013283/ECDM_20190822_Europe_Drought.pdf
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-collection-of-very-valuable-and-scarce-pieces-relating-to-the-last-plague-in-the-year-1665-1721
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/health/coronavirus-is-very-different-from-the-spanish-flu-of-1918-heres-how.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/be-careful-spains-last-1918-flu-survivor-offers-warning-on-coronavirus
https://time.com/5797629/health-1918-flu-epidemic/
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/records-list.html
https://cnu.libguides.com/diseases/flu
https://www.influenzaarchive.org/index.html
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/18/11/ad-1811_article#tnF1
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/coronavirus-press-freedom-crackdown.php
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000007024807/china-coronavirus-propaganda.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/business/wuhan-coronavirus-journalists.html