Wayback means you can't take it back

By Zane

Young kids nowadays need to learn that once you put something on social media you can’t take it back. Now I know almost all young kids just want to have fun and don’t really think or care about  what they’re putting on social media. When I asked multiple people, “Do you know what the Wayback Machine is?” I kept getting the same answer, “No, what is that?”

So, I thought, well, it would probably be a good idea to let the younger generation know. The technical definition for the Wayback Machine is, “The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, California, United States.”

So this just means that every time you post something on the your social media, the archive has bots to take screenshots and store all of the new information. It was created in 2001 and was the size of a couple Coke machines. Now, it stores over 9 petabytes and is growing by 20 terabytes of data every week. A terabyte of data is the size of 1000 Gigabytes. It takes 1000 terabytes of data to make 1 petabyte of data.

Knowing about the Wayback can affect you in many ways. If you’re trying to get a job later in life, you’re not going to want to be putting anything you don’t want your employer to be seeing. If you post it, they can still see it and it could very well affect you. Having the knowledge about it can help you and anyone you tell about it, because the more people that know about it the less likely of people putting illegal things on their social media.

It would be a much better thing if everyone knew about the Wayback Machine. If all parents knew about the Wayback Machine, it would make their kids think twice before posting illegal things or bullying someone online. It is also better for law enforcement to be able to look back on things and come to a conclusion in bullying situations.