The Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam say they are working to preserve public Google+ posts before the platform shuts down in April
Andrew Liptak / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a familiar role for the Internet Archive: back in 2015 it stepped in when Google left archival projects in limbo, and it is repeating that playbook now that Google has committed to deleting every consumer post on Google+. The deletion itself was set in motion by Google's January announcement that all consumer content — posts, pages, photos, videos — would be wiped on April 2.
The urgency traces to December, when Google moved the shutdown up from August and retired Google+ APIs within 90 days after an API bug exposed data on roughly 52.5 million users. That compressed timeline is exactly why volunteer archivists, not Google, are doing the preservation work.
First-order effects
- Public Google+ posts survive only if ArchiveTeam's volunteers finish scraping them before the April 2 cutoff — anything private, plus whatever the crawlers miss, is deleted outright by Google.
- Google exits the social platform business having destroyed its own consumer archive, shifting the preservation burden entirely onto the Internet Archive and ArchiveTeam.
Second-order effects
- Researchers and historians who relied on Google+ as a primary source inherit a partial record: public posts captured by volunteers, with no access to the larger body of deleted private content.
- Every subsequent Google product sunset now carries a built-in scramble by volunteer archivists — a dynamic that repeated when Google moved to wind down Currents, the enterprise successor to Google+, in 2023.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, preservation of platform-era history becomes structurally dependent on unpaid volunteer collectives like ArchiveTeam rather than any obligation on the platforms themselves — a gap regulators weighing data portability and deletion rules may eventually have to address.
- Google's own behavior points the same direction: alongside the Google+ wipe, it has been retiring self-serve access to its historical records, including plans to remove Search's cache functionality entirely.
The trend: As major platforms shut down consumer services, preserving the public record increasingly falls to volunteer archives like the Internet Archive and ArchiveTeam rather than the companies that created the data.