In my opinion, there are a few issues with this strategy:
- Your Tweets may be archived on another site anyway
- You may delete a Tweet that others hold onto for spite (screenshot, archiver, etc.) and then you don't have the surrounding Tweets to link to in order to show context
- If your good Tweets get linked to/embedded from other sources then those links will go bad
I've found the only safe strategy with social media/society is just to be very careful/clear/explicit with what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context. Perhaps that's unfortunate, but that's reality.
> Your Tweets may be archived on another site anyway
Or in the databases of one of their data stream customers, or in the database of someone that customer made the data available or on-sold it to. If you're a Twitter customer you're supposed to read and apply their stream of updates and deletes to your database, so that when someone deletes a tweet in Twitter you delete it too, but in practice Twitter doesn't seem to care or enforce that this happens. It's also just a lot from a technical perspective, the volume of these changes is large.
The only reasonable behaviour is to assume that your government (local police, military, whoever - probably multiple separate agencies) has all your tweets, forever. Not because they hacked Twitter or had the NSA tap the lines - they just bought the data from someone Twitter sold it to. Twitter probably doesn't even know who these down-stream buyers are.
> I've found the only safe strategy with social media/society is just to be very careful/clear/explicit with what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context.
Twitter, as a medium, is anti-context. The UI, the character limit, the behavior of the most prominent voices on the platform, everything encourages you to post hot takes that require as little context as possible to drive engagement.
Being "careful/clear/explicit about what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context" is equivalent to not Tweeting at all.
> everything encourages you to post hot takes that require as little context as possible to drive engagement.
> Being "careful/clear/explicit about what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context" is equivalent to not Tweeting at all.
No, I don't think it's the same as not Tweeting at all. In my experience it just requires self control (which we all lack sometimes and mess up as I certainly have). I mostly use Twitter to tell my friends and my small number of followers what I'm working on and my opinions on things related to domains I have some education or experience in (software, economics, education, etc.). You can use Twitter for mostly professional and anodyne topics. Saying the constraints of the platform encourage you to post hot takes is like saying the constraints of modern working life encourage you to eat junk food. It's true, but it is by no means forced.
> Saying the constraints of the platform encourage you to post hot takes is like saying the constraints of modern working life encourage you to eat junk food.
I don't think that's the correct analogy. I would phrase it more like, "The constraints of being at a bar encourage you to drink alcohol." Of course, you can go to a bar and order a Coca Cola or whatever. But that's not what the bar is set up for. Similarly, you certainly can go on Twitter and post anodyne thoughts about anodyne topics. But that's not what Twitter is set up for.
- Your Tweets may be archived on another site anyway
- You may delete a Tweet that others hold onto for spite (screenshot, archiver, etc.) and then you don't have the surrounding Tweets to link to in order to show context
- If your good Tweets get linked to/embedded from other sources then those links will go bad
I've found the only safe strategy with social media/society is just to be very careful/clear/explicit with what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken out of context. Perhaps that's unfortunate, but that's reality.