Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was tweeted but lost, then so be it.
But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements.
Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not.
Which is EXACTLY why I personally think society should just not allow people under about the age of 25 to even be on social media in the first place. I know, I know, that will never happen because insert reason - but if we don't want everyone's actions to be recorded in perpetuity we should probably stop allowing them to post those actions in a forum that's open to the entire world and easily recorded. You can make laws until you're blue in the face, it's not going to stop an individual from saving whatever stupid thing you said or did and leaking it anonymously should the moment present itself.
So your answer to "young people doing dumb things" is banning young people from doing dumb things until they reach $arbitraryAge? That seems unlikely to happen.
There's a difference between 200 people in a square watching and filming you, and between an organization doing the same thing and then making it available to all of mankind for the rest of time.
Yes... We ban children from doing all sorts of things until they're an appropriate age to make better choices. From getting married to driving to smoking cigarettes.
As I said, I doubt it will happen, that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.
This is why Snapchat became popular, and everyone seems to have forgotten the value in that feature-set. Instagram blatantly cloned half of the Snapchat feature-set and Snapchat itself has also gone to shit.
One of the first things I did when I graduated from high school was delete my twitter account. It was in an effort to get myself together and become more focused in school. Seeing people's careers damaged by tweets when they were kids makes me feel more and more that deleting my account was one of the best decisions I have made.
If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16.
> If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16
Honestly that seems unlikely. If all their friends are on some platform they will find a way to be on it also. Best you can do is really try to educate them on how badly things can boomerang and that the internet never forgets. But even at 16, most kids don't have the life experience and perspective to really understand this.
> It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements.
I'm afraid it really isn't the same at all. Even when I was 25 I did stupid things. I would get drunk in a night club, like everyone else in my age, and on our way home we might have a piss in the middle of a big public square at 4am because we were drunk and stupid. Does that mean I would also get my bits out in the middle of a public square when there are 200 people staring at me? No.
Doing or saying things in a public place != Publicly saying or doing things
You can do private things in a public place, and that's how many people with a very small following feel on social media.
They're doing public things, regardless of their feelings. They could publish with more privacy if they wanted, but there's always the desire of winning the five minutes of fame lottery.
"New York Times rule is a commonsense rule of ethical conduct that a person should not do anything arguably newsworthy in public or in private that one would mind having reported on the front page of a major newspaper. The rule ultimately protects defamatory falsehood.
New York Times rule is also known as New York Times test or New York Times v. Sullivan rule."
In a sense. My point is, you cannot have public conversations and then be aghast when they are stored or captured for later retrieval and critique. That's not a logistics and storage issue, that's a breakdown of critical thinking and nuance in the public sphere (where rational participants would view a tweet or tweet discussion contextually and within the time it occurred, as opposed to present day outrage porn fuel).
The archiving should happen, even if the corpus must go into cold storage ("unavailable to the public") until a time more reasonable, civil discourse over the contents can occur, but those who participate in online conversations should do so cautiously for obvious reasons.
Tangentially, "never put something in writing you wouldn't want to see on the front page of a newspaper" is just good life advice. Have a phone call or in person meeting instead.
It used to be that a private conversation with another person was private. At worst, it was "one person's word against another" so you could operate on a basis of "don't write it down" if you wanted something to be private.
Not sure how much longer that will be the case. People will soon be walking around with the personal equivalant of a police officer's body camera, always on, recording every moment and every interaction with another person.
I would be reluctant, and probably refuse to talk to anyone wearing such a device, but it won't be long before it's not even obvious.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if, at some point, a lot of people routinely wear some sort of AR when out in public. It's possible there will be widespread social pushback (i.e. the Glasshole factor). But I wouldn't bet on it if such a thing were genuinely comfortable and useful.
This kind of thing can never be materially accomplished though. Whenever you post something publicly to the internet, any recipient can back it up indefinitely, separately from the origin network. This is a fundamental material reality. No amount of legislation or centralized control of the content can overcome it.
Ultimately people will have to culturally/collectively get over everyone's internet past, change their own behavior after understanding this new reality, and deal with the consequences of their speech. Even if it were possible, having the ability to remove all copies of past speech would probably produce worse social outcomes. I think I'd rather deal with a person's complicated history, than a history that has been selectively revised to deceive me.
Private, perishable communication is only possible peer-to-peer, through a secure tunnel or network you own, with a person you trust to delete it. The same applies to verbal speech honestly, if you tell somebody something in confidence, it's up to them not to tell anybody else. People just need to accept that using twitter is like making a press release and not like talking to some friends.
The very presence of retweets and likes means they can't ever be treated like verbal conversations. It is a written record mistaken as ephermeral one, period.
But tweets can be important. Who decides whats important and therefore needs to be archived and what not? No one. In the digital age harddrive capacity is basicially infinite so we save everything.
This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory isn't a new thing.
The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement so we get judged by how we are now, not how we was as kids. While I agree people should be held responsible for things they say/do, I also think that at this exact moment in history, people give little to no thought to the idea that people change/grow as they age. Just look at Jenna Marbles on YouTube, she's in self exile because she wore too much fake tan in a video from 10 years ago.
Agreed! I don’t even know stuff is wrong or insensitive sometimes. Someone recently told me not to say the word “Jew.” I wasn’t saying it in a bad way - we were discussing a friend who is Jewish, but I didn’t know just saying the word “Jew” could possibly be taken badly.
When I was younger, I said something about a “Jap.” I honestly was just trying to take a shortcut by saying Jap instead of the full “Japanese” like saying burger instead of hamburger. I got a shock when I was told that was bad.
> The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement
Well, I found some of my conversations on BBSs or Fidonet from over 25 years ago are now on the Web...
So what you say was right as long as it was indeed just 'said', but as soon as something was written and/or recorded somewhere, it may resurface on the Internet one-day, even though it was never intended to appear on the Internet.
Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration.
The ability to broadcast some random thought you have to everyone on the planet, publicly archived and attached to your name, for all of eternity, is a new ability. We've never had it before, and we're discovering the consequences of that. I think it's reasonable to have some disagreement about how that ability should be handled without reducing that disagreement to whether or not words have consequences (obviously they do).
I don't think there is any useful conversation to be had re: "forgetting" that public data. It's a matter of fact. Once data is public it's public. There no magical "forgettable" bits for special classes of digital data.
Deleting copies pof data from public and quasi-public forums isn't practically possible, short of taking away everybody's general purpose computer. I don't think that's going to happen (and I certainly wouldn't want it to).
I think it's just a world we have to live with. I don't particularly like it, but I don't have a choice in the matter.
The trouble with that is that the old tweets from an immature brain are amplified beyond their original context, intentionally, so that they hurt a lot of people, and then a punishment is applied as if the author had just deliberately blasted the world with their remark yesterday. People are using the private conversation analogy because so many teens just meant to write to a few friends or use it as a sort of diary. To make them responsible not only for their youthful immaturity their whole life, but for any mental health struggles, and for not having a perfect understanding of the nature of the service, is cruel and non-productive social behavior from the adults.
You’re having trouble understanding because you are only imagining yourself making these decisions, and you are a fully grown adult who handles life’s pressures well and you understand Twitter from a product perspective. You will need to consider how others use the service to understand why expecting perfect behavior across every person’s entire life is unwise collective behavior.
I’m neutral on a legal intervention but I certainly agree parents should heavily educate and be restrictive until enough has sunk in. We do similarly with our family.
My main concern here is to explain why a young person’s use should not be treated like the use of a sophisticated social media user who is older and more mature.
In this context, we're specifically talking about young people, who are _literally not yet wired_ to properly evaluate consequences. It doesn't mean they get a pass for anything, but surely at some point in your life you've said/done something that wouldn't pass with modern standards, particularly if it can be cherry picked to the word.
The "words have consequences" line of thinking doesn't provide a rationale for the consequences. It is simply a way of avoiding critical thinking about harsh reactions to unpopular statements. You might as well say, "all fallout is good fallout."
Quoting Mohandas Gandhi: "Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err and even to sin. If God Almighty has given the humblest of His creatures the freedom to err, it passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human Beings of that precious right."
Most of those words that have "consequences" nowadays aren't unlawful or even particularly malicious, and some are in fact just jokes and statements of opinion that go against the grain of the zeitgeist. Often, the reaction is more damaging than the words themselves.
It makes me sad just to think about a world where every pub conversation and class discussion I've ever had was archived for posterity. That sounds like misery to me.
On one hand, that's true. On the other hand, 10 years down the road, all you have is 140 characters, and you lose the whole context in which something was written. You know, "Qu'on me donne 6 lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre" and all that.
Everyone is triggered by different things. Your bureaucratic style "words have consequences" sends shivers down the spines of many people who grew up in the Eastern block.
We know the language that precedes cancellations by now.
Why? If what's being held against you later is so awful that it can't be explained away with "I was immature"/"I was angry in the heat of the moment"/"I have since learned that that's not correct," then it must have been a pretty toxic thing to say in public.
It's weird to see the backlash against this when people here are the first to speak out about the need to preserve the internet. Like it or not, Tweets are part of the historical record, and I welcome this move.
People need to be careful what they post online, but come on. Do they really need to archive every tweet?
Seems like they are taking their mission too far. Archiving every post from Usenet dating channels from 20+ years, every tweet, etc. Seems a bit excessive at this point.
Whether or not every tweet in existence should be archived is irrelevant. The fact is they can be, so they should be treated as though they will be.
Saying "no please don't" will never stop something that is technologically possible from happening. Murphy's law applies here and everywhere in tech (and frankly, in most areas of life).
Even if obtaining old tweets was theoretically always possible, actually facilitating this seems like a combination of poor judgment and obsessive hoarding.
If the "smattering of tweets" means everyone's tweets will be publicly available in perpetuity, then this is a downright inhumane policy, and should not be pursued by any organization worthy of respect.
Basically people should be posting anonymously on the internet (via distinct handles with no connection with one's real name), as is done in Hacker News (although a small percent do post enough details in their posts to connect with their real name). Lots of us started out posting with our real names in the last century (on Usenet for example) and after a while realized how poor an idea this was.
Well said, I stopped using Reddit and Twitter because I realized a few things.
First arguing with other angry people all day has never accomplished anything.
Second no matter what you say, in 10 or 20 years it might be absurdly offensive and that can destroy your entire life. The dumbest thing you ever said at 19 is a part of your identity even when you're 42. But that only applies to the internet. If I said something really horrible to you at a bar, the worst that will happen is I'll probably just get kicked out.
I say that on Twitter, you can destroy my career for the rest of my life
It does seem like people ought to just think more about the permanence of what we put online and act accordingly. There is no way to guarantee ephemerality for anything you send to another person online. They can always record or whatever in some way. We have to act like this stuff is entered into the permanent record and be OK with that. There is nothing we can do to 100% prevent stuff being recorded somewhere.
I agree we’d all be better off not judged on our younger attempts at “edginess” and stuff we said while figuring out who we are in our teens. But at a certain point we have to accept that posting anything online anywhere is _publishing_ and if you _published_ a racist letter to the editor at 19, instead of said something offensive at a party, there is a different judgement there & it’s justified.
I do think in time the answer “I’ve grown a lot since that time and regret those tweets” is going to become more acceptable & people will be judged more on recent stuff they say and do.
I wonder if we aren't at a bit of a unique moment in that:
1. Norms around speech have changed quite a bit in a fairly short amount of time.
2. For the first time, we have a group of adults who were largely on the internet as young people.
I think kids today are being raised to be much more cognizant of what they post online, (and what they say in general) so we just had this window from like 96-2015 or so where people where encouraged to post just about anything casually to the internet, and yet south-park style offensive comments were still ok for many kids.
Obviously there's always going to be some edgy-kids saying stupid stuff, and I daresay _most_ young people will say something regrettable if you record them for long enough, but this might be a really large cohort.
None of my social media accounts can be used to identify me. Even when young and stupid I never used my real name on any account. If you're not educated and smart enough to realize what internet is and to protect yourself well then you really shouldn't be on internet. I can't fathom why people connect their social media accounts to their real identity. Is it some kind of ego/narcissism thing? I've never felt the need to make sure my real identity gets credit for doing good things like helping people going through stuff to being a developer member on open source projects.
It would be interesting if someone researched that need. Would be a good addition to OPSEC education.
Of course this will get weaponized, if it isn't already.
We've seen time and time again that a vile old tweet in the wrong hands can be very powerful, it's a ticking time bomb. Think 5 or even 10+ years down the road, some of the kids who are edgy on twitter today might go in to politics or hold some other high level position.
I don't think the current climate is going to cool down anytime soon, but maybe something like this will either lead to mutually assured destruction or, what I'm hoping for, old tweets losing their power in the long run.
I suspect that as a larger and larger percent of the population has a cringey internet past to look back on, the power of old tweets will fade somewhat. It'll take a while though, and of course depends on how vile the past actions are.
I feel like this is an optimistic take. I know a strong number of people that have never thought up a controversial opinion in their life. They will always have that power over the rest of us.
I see it sort of like pot smoking. In about a two decades, we went from "probably the most dangerous drug in the United States today" (Reagan), to "I smoked but I didn't inhale" (Clinton) to "Of course I inhaled, that was the point." (Obama).
It's not that pot suddenly epically skyrocketed in the voting-age population, it's just that enough people either had smoked pot, been around those who did, or watched media that made light of it to realize it wasn't a 100% mark of evil.
High level position? What about automated scrapers and personality algorithms selling profiles to your future employers and insurance companies 20 years later? “This person used to swear a lot, which means they are more likely to be hiding <some condition> that <the data purchaser> is concerned about.” In the gig economy, everyone is a brand that has to be built up and that can be torn down
On the bright side it will be an interesting way to analyze how people's views change over time, seeing how they tweet over a long period. Note that the same tool that can condemn a person can also exonerate them: if they were once upon a time filled with hate an ignorance, and then over time changed, you can show this path convincingly with a full tweet history. But yeah I hope the power to quote out of context to hurt people fades, and quickly.
Look at the media today. Very little is reported in full context. It's carved up, and presented in little snippets to imply something different, often with the intent to provoke outrage in the audience. No confidence that this will change; it is only going to get worse.
But the root of the problem is not the technology, it is the people and the culture.
I have no doubt, using tweets to cancel people is a deliberate tactic of the far left activists to win the culture war. And they are winning, a lot.
After a few more decades, cancel the First Amendment and put people in prison bc of wrong speech is not impossible. Right now the focus is race, gender, identity politics, but it can be easily switched to economic issues. Dark days are ahead of us.
although I hate the aspect of cancel culture where someone's tweets from several years ago are pulled up to destroy their career, I think a lot of the stuff around race, gender, ect. is headed in the right direction. We are at a point where hating on an group of people is simply not o.k. and I think the repercussion are fair (although it is socially acceptable right now to hate on white people, I view this as an overcorrection that will go away soon)
It seems the whole world will have to relearn why forgiveness was once a virtue the hard way. In the near term, it's causing a bifurcation of society into people who exist and had an opinion versus those who didn't, or those who didn't _yet_. In time it seems like the former is just getting larger and larger.
Imagine how the field of mathematics would have evolved if we simply cast aside those who had ever failed to solve a math problem correctly. It needs to be okay for people to make mistakes, otherwise we will never grow as a race.
But even then you know your tweets can be read by anybody. If a platform is fundamentally public, I don't understand how can anyone use it as a form of private communication.
Well it's human nature, really. You are not constantly stepping back and rationally evaluating the present moment. If you have a small bunch of followers and you start a conversation with them, the topic can evolve towards more sensitive matters. Kind of like with normalization of deviance in privacy terms. You just focus on the content of the conversation. As soon as you are answering to anyone, your mind focuses on only that person who said something to you.
Criminals post Facebook photos with evidence of their crimes constantly, as another example.
Thanks, I can see your point better. I guess my real concern is about Twitter being considered the default communication channel for many people. I mean it is perfect for getting updates from orgs/teams the quickest way possible, but to use it as a forum... for me it is incomprehensible.
Doing things in a public place != Doing things publicly
You can do things with a sense of privacy in a public place. When I was young I bought and smoked a lot of weed privately in the middle of a public square.
I can’t say I’m particularly excited about this. People are going to tweet things at 15 years old that they’re going to regret at 30. Why should there be a permanent record of everything that was ever tweeted? It just comes across as obsessive and black mirror-y.
In 2021, I am a little surprised and amused to see so many people who seem to be shocked (shocked!) that the things they post on the Internet might get archived forever. Especially on HN, where technological literacy tends to be a at least a little bit higher than than the average tweeter.
Even back in the early days, it was a common-sense rule of thumb that you never put something on the Internet that you wouldn't want written in the newspaper about you, even in "private" forums such as IRC channels and email. Let alone something as public as twitter.
What are the legal implications of this in regards to the right of being forgotten, copyright laws or even the simple issue of moderation? For example if someone posts a hateful tweet or some extremist content (e.g. photos of terror, etc.) which goes against the law (and therefore gets taken down by Twitter) is it not reprehensible if archive.org is re-publishing such content?
I disagree. Twitter often takes content down which is very problematic, including of very serious sexual and criminal nature and even other non criminal content such as self harming content by children or other people who go through troubling times. Not everything is a Donald Trump tweet and I see serious problems by a blanket unmoderated archive.
I wonder if that is really necessary. Sure, some accounts (like politicians) may need to be preserved until their words may are no longer significant, but why keep the random tweets of irrelevant accounts.
the only reason one could be concerned about/afraid of this is if they recognize that the window of politically acceptable thought is shifting faster than ever these days, such that today's seemingly levelheaded opinion could be cause for cancellation years down the road. that should be the actual cause for concern, not the fact that things that were publicly posted to the Web are being archived.
A couple of years ago, I discovered that archive.org had archived an ancient (1998ish) personal web page of mine. Back when the internet was a smaller, safer and simpler place. It contained a bunch of personally identifiable information, including a phone number and an address.
It took me months to have it removed from their archive. They are extremely (deliberately?) slow to respond to emails. They ignore EU law (right to be forgotten, and in this case GDPR on account of the PII). The domain no longer exists, and my registrar doesn't keep records older than 10 years because of GDPR, so I couldn't use that as a way to prove the page was actually mine. In the end I had to send them a DMCA takedown notice, which only worked because the page footer had a "Copyright Elric $lastname" notice. After another goodly while they finally "removed" the page. I'm sure they didn't actually delete anything, but only flagged the page not to be public.
If you have archived content which you can't conclusively prove is yours, you're pretty much screwed. And it seems like you can no longer prevent them from scraping your content, as they no longer respects robots.txt. I suspect their crawlers aren't nice enough to tell your their actual identity either.
> The domain no longer exists, and my registrar doesn't keep records older than 10 years because of GDPR, so I couldn't use that as a way to prove the page was actually mine.
Wait, are you complaining that they wouldn't take down a page immediately upon your request with no proof that it actually belonged to you?
In a reductionist sort of way, I guess I am. But they should probably ask for permission before archiving stuff forevermore. Or at least make it easier to block them.
I wonder how this will jive with GDPR/CCPA right to be forgotten laws.
If a person has the right to be forgotten, I can't imagine that this decision will be allowed to continue for so long.
Does the person have to ask for their information to be deleted under these laws? If so, this might be an additional avenue or good next step for protection laws.
I really fail to see how these laws should or could realistically apply to information that is published publicly.
It's reasonable to expect they have something to say about the expectations and rights that a user of a platform ought to be entitled to in their interaction with that platform. However it's rather another thing to follow that this permission should extend to anybody who legally can copy or retain that information under the tenants of fair use or first sale doctrine.
This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier work in perpetuity. That is an absolutely ludicrous notion.
>This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier work in perpetuity
No, it is not the same. An author of a published book has intention to share it with the public and understands how the system works: you would not expect from this person to make any assumptions about the right to recall all the copies. An author of a post in social media may not recognize the fact, that the actual audience is beyond what he or she expected and that he or she is not in control of the access to this publication. The intentions and expectations are very different, and it is not the fault of social media users that they did not understand how to protect their privacy when living the digital life.
The example with "public forum" is a good one here, because speaking in public offline (e.g. having a conversation with friends or addressing a crowd) does not imply that the exact words or other details will be remembered and recorded, on the contrary, without special effort taken by participants any conversation is not recorded by default. That said, even if they are formally in their right and logically it makes sense that whatever is posted with public visibility should be expected to be copied and backed up, those archives are still attacking the privacy and should be regulated by law. There's much more public interest in that than in preserving some tweets, because they may appear important for history. After all, we spent thousands of years without recorded evidence of what people talked about and we are doing just fine.
> An author of a post in social media may not recognize the fact, that the actual audience is beyond what he or she expected and that he or she is not in control of the access to this publication.
I agree with you wholeheartedly were we discussing Facebook or any number of platforms that give the user the ability to restrict the audience to something that is not-quite-public and not-quite-private. However outside of DMs everything on Twitter is explicitly public.
I see the point of desiring some ability to have an "open but private" conversation online, but again I really don't think it applies to Twitter as it currently exists. There are a lot of inequivalences when trying to apply the aspects you describe from the real world onto the online forum, not the least of which is the expectation of privacy when posting a public tweet has been explicitly waived.
Should something like this exist? Sure, why not? For many of us oldschool geeks, IRC was kind of like this, but modern replacements like Discord and Slack take a completely contrarian view and probably couldn't succeed otherwise. Humans are still very much in the infancy of what it means to extend society into cyberspace, and the end result is increasingly looking like it's not going to be the way any of us pictured it.
Non-EU data processors are subject to the GDPR if their business customer (data controller) is, according to the triggers mentioned above. To give an example: an online retailer based in the US advertises its products at Google AdWords and targets consumers in the EU and therefore falls within the scope of the GDPR. If the retailer uses the services of a cloud provider to manage its EU customer information, hosting of such data in the cloud will also trigger applicability of the GDPR. The cloud vendor must comply with the (limited) GDPR obligations for data processors.
Well I guess it's good that they're also going to be archiving Jason Scott's mean and abusive tweets. How archive.org doesn't reign in his behavior when he is such a publicly well known figure is beyond me.
There is no escape from cancellation. 500 years from now, someone running for a mayor of some colony somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy will have his aspirations crushed because of something their great*5 grandfather wrote on twitter.
This is a bit tangential, but I wish we weren’t seeing links to tweets showing up as hn stories. It’s not a legitimate news source, and it bans people left and right for nothing because they have such serious botting and conspiracy theory problems
You can’t say anything of substance in 280 characters, or find room to cite references. It’s just a bunch of disembodied statements meant to go viral to build peoples followings or get people mad, with no meaningful discussion back and forth (for the same reasons). Maybe I’m just getting old, but Twitter seems like a bad way to get and share information, even without the random bans. Apologies if I just haven’t seen the good parts of Twitter yet
That is debatable (I personally don't agree with your view at all), but regardless people are still allowed to post and discuss meaningless content here.
I’m not talking about being allowed, I’m talking more about spending the extra moment to find a non Twitter information source before submitting articles, and to hesitate before upvoting a Twitter link when there are som many other great stories under new
