Should Journalists Really Be Indiscriminately Deleting Their Old Tweets?

The following may seem like a weirdly pedestrian discussion, but it does have some important implications for how we conduct journalism in the current era. You may have noticed that lots of prominent Twitter personalities who could be vaguely situated under the banner of “political media” have taken to mass-deleting their old tweets. They’ve been tweeting in a professional capacity for years — that is, they’ve had some media job or collection of media jobs which entailed them expressing opinions online — and they evidently no longer wish for those past expressions to be publicly viewable. I’m not going to name specific examples here, but they should be evident enough: people who’ve been tweeting regularly since 2009 but who now conspicuously have 800 total tweets should be giveaways as mass-deleters.

The average Twitter user, clearly, has no obligation to retain their tweets and should feel free to mass-delete or not mass-delete delete as they see fit. Journalists and others who receive payment in exchange for expressing their views online, however, can be reasonably considered to operate under a different set of expectations. What are those expectations? Obviously, they’re not hard-and-fast. There’s no universal code dictating how journalists should manage their social media output. That said, there are some general principles that seem applicable.

Twitter clearly serves a journalistic function in that reporters have for years conducted their work via Twitter. They cultivate stories over Twitter, incrementally build narratives over Twitter, and hash out disagreements over Twitter. Given that the platform is iterative, it’s possible to discern through tweets how journalists’ various analyses and reporting may have changed over time. Indiscriminately purging old tweets prevents access to what in some sense is a historical record. This, thereby, impedes research and altogether looks a tad… odd or even evasive.

Certainly there are legions of internet sleuths running around who love to pore through tweets to ferret out apparent contradictions. This is often done in bad faith and can be annoying, as I can personally attest. But still, that’s a small price to pay for maintaining one’s public journalistic/commentary record. The “mass deletion” trend also gives journalists cover in that they can deny having taken a position or expressed a view which they plainly did, but evidence for which is contained only on Twitter. In eliminating this evidence, they insulate themselves from accountability.

There are and have always been valid reasons to delete individual tweets: whether due to an error, a poor word choice, etc. Those ought to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. But mass purging, which is increasingly common, just takes an indiscriminate axe to one’s entire tweet history. Certain web archiving services make recovery of tweets possible in some instances, but that’s nowhere near as easy as simply making use of Twitter’s built-in search feature. Journalists who wish to purge these records — and they are a kind of record — might want to consider: what necessary difference is there between deleting old tweets en masse and deleting old articles or blog posts en masse?

The public is generally pretty tolerant of how views can evolve over time, as long as no blatant hypocrisy or outright deception is involved. In those cases, it’s useful to have a public record available so the hypocrisies or deceptions can be illuminated. But for the mass-deleting journalists, these avenues of recourse are no longer available. They eliminate a mechanism by which accountability can be enforced. Of all the things that online journalism needs right now, “less accountability” is probably not one of them.