Why can’t the National Library archive social media content?

Australia’s official record of the 2025 federal election will not include one of the most important parts of the campaign: social media.

After each election, the National Library of Australia (NLA) makes a call out for items from every candidate, party and political group to build a record of how the election was fought.

This includes campaign materials such as flyers, how-to-vote cards and candidate t-shirts, as well as other non-campaign materials like newspaper articles.

The NLA also collects digital election materials. Its Australian Web Archive collects regular snapshots of all the websites on Australian internet domains (.au), and also archives some specific election-related content, too.

For example, the NLA’s archive captured snapshots of a handful of parties’ Twitter accounts during the 2022 federal election.

However, the 2022 archive does not include content from the many other, widely used social media platforms that have formed a foundational part of modern campaigning.

Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, Threads and others are not captured by the Australian Web Archive’s typical collection as they reside on foreign internet domains, despite hosting Australian content.

The NLA does not appear to have archived content from any of these platforms during the 2022 election. Even the snapshots of Twitter are limited to just a few parties’ accounts and don’t include data from politicians, candidates, other groups or the public.

The 2025 federal election appears to be no different. When asked about its plans for collecting social media content from the election, a spokesperson for the NLA said it faces problems.

“It continues to be very difficult for the National Library and other collecting institutions to collect, preserve and provide access to social media.”

The spokesperson pointed to the NLA’s “Strategic Vision 2025-2033” document published earlier this year. It outlined the hurdles to archiving social media.

“This is primarily related to business decisions made by platform owners, and having no set international standards or well-established tools for capturing and archiving social media,” the document explains.

Dr Samantha Vilkins, from the Queensland University of Technology Digital Media Research Centre, is researching online Australian political debate and has previously worked at the NLA.

She said that archiving social media has long been a problem, but was surprised to hear that the NLA didn’t yet have a solution.

The lack of an archive raises a number of problems, Vilkins said. Social media content often gets deleted after elections, and so a third-party archive might be the only record of what was happening online during the campaign. Vilkins gave the example of “inflammatory” content during the Voice to Parliament campaign which she said has since been removed.

“There’s issues for election scrutiny, because we know that a lot of content gets deleted post-election, particularly inflammatory content, which is obviously much harder to investigate when it disappears,” she said.

Outside of that purpose, archives serve an important purpose by capturing our shared culture and history through preservation of things like election materials.

“So much more activity and variety, from more candidates, is being put out during elections than in the past thanks to social media platforms, but we are at risk of a lot of it ending up missing in our collective memory,” she said.

The NLA is accepting physical material collected during the 2025 election through the mail or by dropping it off in person.