Firsthand Experience as an Expert Witness
This is one of the most important things I can tell any attorney handling an internet defamation matter, based directly on what I've seen in these cases as an expert witness: in a large share of matters, by the time the case is being seriously investigated, the original content — the post, the profile, the review — is already gone. And the common assumption, sometimes made by attorneys as well as clients, that "it's probably on archive.org" turns out to be wrong far more often than expected.
The Usual Reasons
Posters delete content once they realize it's created legal exposure for them. Platforms remove content after user reports, even when the target never filed one. Accounts get deactivated or banned entirely, taking every post down at once. Reviews get quietly edited or withdrawn. And in some cases, content is deliberately deleted specifically because someone became aware they were being investigated or that a demand letter was coming — which is itself sometimes probative of consciousness of wrongdoing, but only if the deletion itself was documented.
How the Wayback Machine Actually Works
The Wayback Machine only has a snapshot of a specific URL if that exact page happened to be crawled by archive.org's bots at some point — and its crawlers heavily favor major websites and popular pages, not individual social media posts, specific reviews, or personal profile pages. Most of that content is never crawled at all, particularly on platforms like Facebook and Instagram that restrict what outside crawlers can even access. Relying on archive.org as a backup plan, instead of capturing evidence while it's live, is one of the most common reasons I see evidence turn out to be unavailable later in a matter.
The Practical Takeaway
Treat every piece of defamatory content a client reports as something that could disappear at any moment, because it often does. Instruct clients to capture it immediately — screenshots, source pages, timestamps — rather than assuming the firm or an investigator can retrieve it later. This is worth stating explicitly and in writing at intake, not left as an assumption.