Mediated recordkeeping and epistemic accountability in social media archiving

Abstract Social media archiving has become an established institutional practice, yet uncertainty remains about what social media archives can be used as evidence of and how platform-mediated conditions shape evidential meaning. This paper addresses that problem by introducing the Mediated Recordkeeping Model (MRKm) as a conceptual and analytical framework for examining epistemic accountability in social media archiving. Building on records continuum theory, the MRKm explicitly models mediation, power and the distributed production of meaning across platforms, institutions and communities, responding to a theoretical gap in archival scholarship on how evidentiality is produced and constrained under platform conditions. The paper places the framework within contemporary contexts of platform capitalism, technical volatility, and ethical and legal constraints, and it argues that archival practice does not adequately specify how socio-technical infrastructures and institutional decisions actively shape what is known through archived social media. The analytical value of the MRKm is demonstrated through a deliberately partial, documentation-based application to the State Library of New South Wales Social Media Archive, which shows how evidential ambiguity and absence are produced through capture, organisation, curation and access design. The paper further introduces platform paradata as a practical mechanism for operationalising epistemic accountability by documenting these mediations. Rather than proposing a prescriptive solution or institutional evaluation, the paper positions epistemic accountability as a core archival responsibility and advances the MRKm as a diagnostic framework for explaining the conditions, constraints and trade-offs through which platform-mediated archives shape evidential meaning.