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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Services such as this cannot delete a tweet from other services or people who archive them or even just take a screenshot. You still have to assume that anything to post on Twitter will be public forever.

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As someone whose current Twitter account was created around 2013, only 1.9% of my 2248 tweets appear in Google thanks to archiving around once every 24 hours, that includes hits due to archiving by third party services. Meanwhile regular people can read my account without having to follow.

That's a 98.1% reduction in one big source of potential HR-related hiring showdowns.

There are plenty of benefits to a service like this

> There are plenty of benefits to a service like this

Are they greater than the benefits of simply never tweeting at all?

Naturally. If you treat twitter as the service it started as (a microblogging service) then being able to share those short updates while they are relevant, and have them deleted once their applicability expires, keeps things nice and clean without having to give up a voice.

It depends on the benefits the individual gets from still using Twitter.

That’s like making the argument for abstinence vs. birth control. Yes, the only 100% solution is not to ever post anything publicly. But there is still value in making things more private/less permanently persistent for the people who still choose to post.

Since you can delete posts through most services, even not posting anything isn't 100%.

For instance: I notice that you deleted this tweet. Interesting choice of avatar by the way.

https://i.imgur.com/0R4Xn6O.png

It’s probably unfair to compare one of many means of communication online with a singular activity burned into the fabric of our genetic ancestry for hundreds of millions of years. Or: it’s like saying you shouldn’t eat bacon, not that you shouldn’t eat at all.

>That’s like making the argument for abstinence vs. birth control.

This isn't birth control. This is going, "What? There's no way this could be my kid!" on Maury.

> You still have to assume that anything to post on Twitter will be public forever.

That's generally a good assumption to make, it's definitely the case for HN. But finding someone's old tweets is orders of magnitudes easier via Twitter's advanced search, than to try to retroactively find them via Google and hope one of the disparate social-media-mirroring sites have captured them. Even Internet Archive will only have a spotty record of someone's timeline -- and IA won't capture the /with_replies endpoint since that requires being logged in.

I never trust any screenshot. Way too easy to fake.

Weird coincidence, that's just what NASA just tweeted:

https://imgur.com/a/cHES1

Since they are an agency of the government, can one ask to get a tweet pulled out as a stamped and verified document?

The federal government has policies that govern retention of social media:

https://records-express.blogs.archives.gov/2017/01/27/record...

> Bulletin 2014-02 informs agencies that content created on social media platforms, including Twitter, is likely to be a Federal record and must be managed appropriately. For records posted on third-party social media platforms, agencies must determine how best to manage the records for the appropriate retention period and capture them where appropriate. Some social media records may be temporary, with a transitory, short, or long-term retention. However, some dispositions may be permanent, requiring the records to be preserved until their eventual transfer to the National Archives.

Nice thanks

No idea what rights you'd have in the US, I'm not a citizen :-)

This screenshot of a NASA tweet is fake

You know that because it is a recent tweet.

Now imagine someone deletes all their old tweets programmatically. Several people have screenshots of an "old" tweet as they allegedly saw and "saved". Who do you believe?

https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/22ea282...

I don’t see that it would make any difference whether they systematically delete there tweets or not. You could still claim it’s missing due to being specifically deleted.

You can’t prove someone didn’t tweet something, but you can prove they did tweet something - if the tweet hasn’t been deleted, which is the common case for people who don’t systematically delete their tweets.

Sure, I thought that was obvious.

In Chrome: right-click, inspect. Edit page source. Done. Less than two minutes, and you don't need to have a tech background to do it.

Never trust screenshots.

Maybe they just want you to think it's a weird coincidence.

;)

By the way, official users of the Twitter firehose are required to honor tweet deletes. So while it is certainly the case that some kinds of archives (based on scrapers or screenshots or whatever) will keep tweets forever, other kinds do not.

Does twitter provide a stream of deleted tweets to tell them what to remove? Now that would be very interesting data to look at.

They apparently do, and indeed it would be far more interesting than the rest of the firehose! Especially for politicians and the like, it would label tweets with examining. Most would be typos, the rest could be gold.

Very true. Once it's out there, content can't be deleted.

Can't see any type of benefit to these services, besides for those who wish to automate their tasks.

The benefit is risk reduction, not absolutism. You make it hard for lazy people with a bone to pick to find your old Tweets. You also increase the ambiguity (was this screenshot faked?) and costs for someone trying to uncover old Tweets at scale.

Today’s lazy person is tomorrow’s AI task that’s trivial and universally applied. When publishing to the net, think of your future.

Yeah, just got to think about it as like a bike lock. It won't stop dedicated attackers or the government, but it stops opportunists and by putting it slightly above the rest of the low hanging fruit.

Some may engage in absurd tweet storms, followed by tweetdelete.net delete loops, intentionally, to ensure their own demise, for one reason or another. They may want things to be permanently documented in the very system that is complicit in their demise, so as to ensure that they would "never get another job in this town again".

Simultaneously, this may be a cry for help, something far beyond simply asking for mental help.

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