Do you delete your past tweets? Should you delete your past tweets and other social media posts? Should there be a time limit on them?
Services like Twitter offer you to download your tweets. Why not download them every 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, or more? Then remove the past posts leaving a shorter list of posts.
With the current environment on social media, where online mobs can descend on you at any moment, it would be good to give people the option of removing past social media posts from the platform. I’m sure there is more than one post that could be taken out of context or the intent of the post forgotten. It’s considered a safety issue as well.
Now, for most social media companies, I’m sure they don’t delete the posts you’ve deleted. They mark it as deleted and then don’t display it to others including yourself.
It reminds me of being a musician in the ’70s and ’80s and live performances. Most live performances were not recorded back then. Because of that, good performances that I might have wanted to be recorded were not. And luckily, bad performances were not captured either. Unless somebody had a rogue tape recording of it.
It would be good to have features built into social media platforms where we could set the time period of posts to be deleted. Also, when to stop following someone, like after one year or when their account goes stale. Another example is if there are follower or friend requests just sitting for 30, 60, or 90 days, then have them deleted automatically.
On Facebook, I typically delete all posts for one year manually except one post that reflects that year or some kind of family photo post I want to stay up. So after 12 years of being on FaceBook, I have 12 posts to manage. Super easy.
For Twitter, I downloaded my data first and then used tweetdelete.net to delete tweets starting 90 days ago and back. Then every 90 days going forward, do the same routine. There are other services that can do this, but tweetdelete.net happens to be free. Who knows, maybe I’ll repurpose those tweets at another time.