Of Course, I Auto-Delete Old Tweets

My personal Twitter account @CriticalMAS does not have any tweets older than 60 days. I use a service called TweetDelete that scrubs any tweet or like that is older than 2 months. I’m baffled why this isn’t a common practice.

99% of the people looking at old tweets will not have your best interest. They are either bots trying to scrape data to build a model to sell you directly or sell the models to others that will then try to sell you on some goods or services. Or worse, they are trying to find a way to cancel you for something you may have tweeted in the past that may or may not have been acceptable in the past, but now isn’t.

Photo by Jeremy Zero

Here is one example:

Local Man Uses Viral Fame To Raise $1 Million for Charity, Journalist Digs Up Offensive Tweets He Made at Age 16

We continue to see people losing jobs and sponsorships based on tweets they sent years ago, often when they were teenagers. Now, although I don’t use Twitter in anything close to an edgy manner, I don’t feel the need to defend a Tweet or a Like that I made years ago. My opinions change. Things that used to be funny to me, sometimes aren’t anymore. I’ve changed and I continue to change. Where is the upside to having a permanent record of my thoughts and views from years ago to me? It is almost a downside risk.

If I want to save something for archival purposes, I’ll do it here on my blog or over on INeedCoffee. These are my playgrounds. I own them. I can’t be kicked off these platforms. Both are now more than 20 years old.

I also periodically will delete old Facebook posts. Same idea.