“These social media platforms ultimately are commercial enterprises. In part, they make their money from selling access to data, so not all of this content is simply freely available,” says Professor Axel Bruns, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre. “So much of our lives now happens in social media spaces, in the same way perhaps that in the 1800s or so, letters between people would have been a really important source,” Bruns says. “Interactions and public responses by social media users to what’s happening in the world are a really important source of information not just right now ... but also in the future.”