Fusion: “Meet the tweet-deleters”

Auto-deleting tweets is a novel solution to this problem. And in an age when Twitter misfires end careers and ruin lives every day, it’s not hard to see its usefulness. Ask Jeb Bush’s former chief technology officer if he wishes he’d auto-deleted his six-year-old tweets about “sluts.” Or ex-Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson, who was ousted from his position after unsavory tweets he’d posted years before made it into the social web’s spotlight. Or the three Toronto firefighters who lost their jobs after media outlets published tweets from them quoting sexist lines from TV shows.

Most tweet-deleters, though, are not trying to protect themselves from a dark past. (After all, the worst gaffes often stand in the public record, no matter whether the original offending tweet got deleted.) Instead, they want their Twitter accounts to reflect their present states of mind and interests.

Kevin Roose

I’ve seen this practice through my blog, where I embed tweets on some articles; some of them are no longer available later and following the embedded link shows they were deleted. To me, it makes little sense: it’s like having a conversation now and denying everything a week later. If you can’t handle your ‘opinions’ being public record, maybe you shouldn't express them publicly in the first place?