Online information is more temporary than it seems
News articles, Telegram posts, and public statements often appear permanent once they are published online. In reality, digital content can change at any moment.
A headline may be rewritten, a number corrected, a quote removed, or additional context added. In some cases, an entire publication may disappear. Telegram makes this particularly noticeable because posts can be edited or deleted after they have already been shared, quoted, and discussed.
Editing itself is not necessarily a problem. Newsrooms regularly correct mistakes and update developing stories. The difficulty arises when only the final version remains available and there is no reliable way to see what was originally published.
Without access to previous versions, it becomes harder to understand why a particular statement attracted attention, where a widely shared quote came from, or how the public conversation around an event developed.
What Ministry of News (MUN) found in its first 100 days
During its first 100 days, Ministry of News (MUN) collected 429,596 publications, including news articles and Telegram posts.
The system identified edits in 33,882 publications. By the hundredth day, another 4,468 collected materials were no longer available at their original sources.
Together, edited and unavailable publications accounted for 38,350 items, or 8.93% of the entire collected dataset.
A separate analysis covering 100 calendar days from May 18 to August 25 focused specifically on deleted content. During that period, 4,124 publications disappeared from their original sources.
That equals an average of 41.24 removals per day — approximately one publication every 35 minutes.
Telegram was responsible for around 97.43% of the complete removals recorded during that period.
These figures do not explain why a publication was changed or deleted. They simply document an observable fact: the content was publicly available and was later modified or became unavailable.
Why preserving earlier versions matters
When a publication disappears, the loss is not limited to a broken link.
The original version may contain wording that explains later reactions, media coverage, or public statements. A deleted Telegram post, for example, may already have been quoted by journalists or circulated across social networks before it was removed.
If that original version was not preserved, reconstructing what happened becomes much more difficult.
Search engines are not designed to maintain a complete history of every page. Cached copies can disappear, while general web archives may not capture a publication before it is changed.
A dedicated digital archive can provide something different: a documented record of what was available at a particular moment.
Evidence should remain separate from interpretation
An important principle of digital archiving is distinguishing between what happened and why it happened.
A publication may be edited because of a spelling mistake, an incorrect date, a changed figure, or new information about a developing event. In other situations, a quote, allegation, or significant part of a public statement may be removed.
The archive itself should not automatically interpret those changes as manipulation.
Instead, it should allow journalists, researchers, fact-checkers, and other users to compare versions and examine the evidence themselves.
They can ask practical questions: What did the original headline say? Which paragraph was changed? How long was the first version available? Was the correction disclosed? Did the original wording already influence public discussion?
This makes the archive a verification tool rather than a collection of accusations.
Why Telegram requires particular attention
Telegram has become an important channel for breaking news, political commentary, official announcements, and public statements in Ukraine.
A single post can quickly spread beyond the platform. It may become a source for media reports, screenshots, social media discussions, and political reactions.
But if that post is later edited or deleted, the original wording can be extremely difficult to recover.
The Ministry of News (MUN) data illustrates the scale of this challenge: Telegram represented the overwhelming majority of complete removals recorded during the analyzed 100-day period.
Preserving Telegram content at the moment it appears therefore helps maintain the context around information that may later become important.
Ministry of News (MUN) as a digital accountability archive
Ministry of News (MUN) is developing an archive of news publications, Telegram posts, and public statements that preserves previous versions and records changes over time.
Its purpose goes beyond recovering individual deleted posts.
As the archive grows, it can help reveal broader patterns in the information environment: how frequently publications are edited, how quickly content disappears, what kinds of wording tend to change, and whether sources clearly communicate corrections.
For journalists, this can help verify quotations and sources. For fact-checkers, it can make it easier to reconstruct timelines. Researchers can study patterns of editing and deletion, while civil society organizations can preserve public statements that may remain relevant even after they disappear from their original platforms.
Digital content can be changed or deleted in seconds. Its impact on public discussion, however, may last much longer.
That is why preserving not only what is online now, but also what was originally published, is becoming an essential part of understanding the modern information environment.