Internet data does not have a pile of electrons
A bit—the basic unit of digital information—is a physical system’s distinguishable state, not a tiny object. A computer can represent a bit using trapped electrical charge, a magnetic direction on a disk, or another measurable difference. There is no electron assigned to each bit, and much of the information people call “the internet” is copied across many devices.
So you cannot total up the electrons “holding” all online data and give that collection a meaningful weight. In a flash-memory chip, for example, some bits are encoded by charge trapped in a cell. On a magnetic disk, bits are encoded by the orientation of magnetic regions. The electrons in those materials are part of the hardware whether or not it contains a particular file.
What data can add to a system’s mass
Changing a device’s state can change its energy. Because energy contributes to mass, in principle that change also changes the system’s mass. But the amount depends on how the data is physically encoded and stored—not simply on how many bytes exist. A different storage technology, or a different arrangement of the same data, need not produce the same change.
The useful distinction is between the mass of the storage hardware and the tiny energy-related mass difference associated with its state. The first is ordinary matter; the second is a property of the physical system, not a separate stash of data-carrying electrons. That is why the internet’s data cannot be weighed by counting electrons, even though every bit ultimately has to be represented somewhere in the physical world.
