IndexThe fall of a social media giantThe advent of MySpace and the digital dark ageMySpace's mark on popular cultureBefore Facebook took control of the Internet and stealing the social lives of netizens, there was one social networking site that permeated the early years of the social media era: MySpace. Somehow, it still exists today despite the three social media giants (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) almost entirely dominating the competition, leaving MySpace in the dust. Perhaps users from its early years still return to the site from time to time, revisiting the music files they uploaded. Unfortunately, this can no longer happen for many MySpace users as 53 million files have reportedly disappeared from the site. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The Fall of a Social Media Giant The deteriorating state of the once-dominant social media platform just went from bad to worse. Files uploaded to MySpace before 2016 may be gone forever, the company said recently on its website. The accidental deletion of the aforementioned files occurred after the site had undergone a server migration project, but the cause of the sudden disappearance of the files has not yet been disclosed. “As a result of a server migration project, all photos, videos and audio files uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace,” the company said in an online notice posted Monday. "We apologize for the inconvenience." An estimated 53 million songs have been removed from the site's database, all from around 14 million artists. However, it is still unclear how many of these music files have been uploaded by users since MySpace announced in 2013 that it contains more than 52 million songs from record labels and its users. Publications have since assumed that the data loss may have been due to MySpace's poor archiving practices as the social networking company refused to entertain questions regarding the incident, thus providing no further details about what happened. However, according to Damon Krukowsi of Pitchfork, the huge data leak on MySpace actually happened months ago and only a few noticed the incident until MySpace itself revealed to everyone that it had experienced a data leak, suggesting that the people and publications have already lost interest in the social networking site in favor of the public. able to overlook an incident that would have been a headliner if it had happened on a more popular platform like Facebook. “The increased disdain for MySpace suggests a collective loss of interest in the kind of history we associate with archives – a reconstruction of a specific moment in the past,” Krukowski wrote. One of the artists trying to recover lost music on MySpace is Jordan Tallent, who contacted the site's company after songs from his former band Where Got Ghost mysteriously disappeared. In an email, MySpace responded to Tallent, informing him of the data loss in the site's archive. However, the email stated that only those uploaded to the site before 2013 were lost. "If you had a MySpace profile before 2013, some content related to classic MySpace accounts (messages, comments, blogs, videos, etc.) is no longer available for retrieval or download, as it has not been migrated to our redesigned website which was launched in 2013,” the company said. The Advent of MySpace and the Dark Ages of DigitalMySpace has found its point.