Proactive ephemerality: How journalists use automated and manual tweet deletion to minimize risk and its consequences for social media as a public archive

Web archiving and proactive ephemerality

Web archiving is widely acknowledged as a solution for addressing the problem of the web’s ephemerality, and for providing evidence of the Web’s past (Brügger, 2018). In the past two decades, methods for web archiving have been institutionalized and standardized. The Internet Archive and dozens of national libraries around the world have developed software, policies, and best practices for preserving large portions of the Web (Ben-David, 2019; Ben-David and Amram, 2018). However, methods for web archiving, along with the justification and legitimacy of web archives as bearers of public evidence, may be suited for the open web but are ill-equipped for preserving social media content inside proprietary “walled gardens” (Littman et al., 2018).

Nevertheless, researchers have pointed to the value of social media platforms as a digital depository for individuals (Ruppert, Law and Savage, 2013) and to the ways in which social and mobile media documentation shape people’s experiences and memories (Özkul and Humphreys, 2015). Scholars are relying on social media to investigate contemporary cultural phenomena while arguing that published and distributed content on social media platforms may reflect people’s beliefs and behaviors (e.g. Bonilla and Rosa, 2015). Thus, social media are historically significant (Ankerson, 2012) for diverse memory agents including historians, sociologists, media scholars, journalists as well as lay attempts people make to memorialize the past. From such a societal perspective, it seems important to ask to what extent is social media being preserved and by whom.

Although of clear retrospective importance, researchers have demonstrated how social media users correctly perceive this medium as ephemeral, live, and constantly changing, where new stories are pushing back old ones, encouraging users to forget rather than remember (Bayer et al., 2016; Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014) because platforms continuously redesign themselves and in the process past content is reshaped or even gets lost in translation (Brügger, 2018). While scholars have considered the inadvertent ephemeral nature of web content (such as linkrot and content migration) and the challenges in archiving social media content (Ben-David, 2016; Brügger, 2018; Milligan, 2016), this current research focuses on what we define as “proactive ephemerality,” a social media phenomenon that occurs when users intentionally remove their own content from their social media profiles manually or with the aid of mechanical tools.

Although journalists’ tweeting practices have received a fair amount of scholarly attention (Hermida, 2013), scholars consider the extent to which journalists treat Twitter and other social media as ephemeral only obliquely. Journalists use Twitter to post breaking news, and their employers encourage them to do so (Usher et al., 2018). Hence, Twitter is a promotional venue for both the news organization and the individual journalist who uses Twitter as a branding tool to present their work and engage with audiences (Molyneux et al., 2018). In addition, journalists use Twitter to retweet opinion, humor, and other content posted by others (Molyneux, 2015). Another typical way journalists use Twitter is as a space for public note-taking. Hence, Twitter is an outlet for journalists’ live-tweeting of various public events (Barnard, 2016). Twitter is also an arena for meta-journalistic discourse where journalists criticize and reflect on journalism as a field (Carlson, 2016). These findings suggest that most journalists’ practices on Twitter are oriented toward the present.

Work on journalism and memory has demonstrated how news production and products are involved in shaping collective memory (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2014). In posting journalistic content on social media, journalists shape collective memory (Han, 2020). If a newspaper is the first draft of history, then journalists’ professional tweets are “the first draft of the first draft of history”—as described by one of the interviewed journalists in this study. We argue that to fully understand how news producers shape collective memory through their use of social media, we must attend not only to what they post but also to what they proactively delete.

Entrepreneurship and journalism

The entrepreneur is future-oriented and ego-tropic, creating new products and ventures in pursuit of an individual vision (Gill, 2013). Such a temporal individualist orientation is oppositional to the archival impetus of preserving the past in the interest of the collective future needs of society. In general, social media platforms reflect the entrepreneurial ethos of their founders, legitimizing users’ intensive image management (Marwick, 2013). Workers feel a need, in a precarious labor market, to constantly craft their social media identity to serve their occupational goals (Gershon, 2017).

The entrepreneurial ethos is increasingly dominant in contemporary journalism as news ventures adopt technology sector practices and norms. In such an entrepreneurial labor market, image management might become more legitimate (Carlson and Usher, 2016), potentially supporting extensive deletion. As entrepreneurial journalists change employers, beats, or political orientations, contexts collapse and collide into one another (Davis and Jurgenson, 2014). Discourse and practices accepted in a past context conflict with what is acceptable or expected in the present, presenting the journalist as inconsistent or insincere and hence calling their occupational suitability into question. One possible way of avoiding such a collapse is to pre-empt it by editing past discourse to conform to the present and future. Moreover, the constant pressure to produce news content in an entrepreneurial industry (Bakker, 2012) might make journalists more error-prone while tweeting, driving more deletion later.

Journalists use Twitter for “professional brand development” (Molyneux, 2015). However, they could vary in their tendency and approach to deletion. While many have an entrepreneurial career whether by choice or compulsion (Davidson and Meyers, 2015) driving perhaps more retrospective editing of a journalist’s profile, others still enjoy stable employment and hence have less of a need to constantly reshape their online presence.

Temporality and work

As the future-oriented focus of entrepreneurship illustrates, time is a central dimension of work. Workers deal with objective temporal constraints and subjectively experience time in various ways. Manipulating time is a key mechanism for maintaining social control in the workplace. Workers can create “temporal niche[s] . . . a slice of time, cut from the rest of work time in which a worker or group of workers have autonomy” (Fine, 1990: 112). Restaurant cooks create such niches communally by covering for their colleagues, thereby allowing them to take time-off mid-shift. In a large technology firm, managers exercised “boundary control,” made up of cultural and bureaucratic tools to motivate and incentivize workers to spend more time at work and less at home. Some employees resisted such control by setting a rigid personal workday schedule as well as by sharing responsibilities with their team to regain temporal control over their lives, in the knowledge that it would limit career advancement (Perlow, 1998).

Commercial social media platforms prompt users, as unpaid media workers, to share historical content but use this content to create a constant flow of ephemeral posts to focus users on recently shared content rather than to create coherent historical narratives and a functional archive users could manipulate (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014). Hence, social media users have limited options to secure temporal control.

Turning to journalism, there is “an insufficient address to the temporality of news consumption” (Zelizer, 2018: 119), a tendency in both professional and scholarly discourse to assume that the lag between news production and consumption is brief to non-existent. Journalists’ decision to delete tweets involves a reflection that tweets can be consumed and redistributed well after their initial posting outside their original temporal context. Deleting tweets could be a novel means of creating a temporal niche by erasing much of a journalist’s public record preserving a limited continuously moving temporal window into a news worker’s online presence.

In this study, we investigate the manifestation of proactive ephemerality in social media. To do so, we therefore ask the following research questions:

Deletion practices

A majority of the journalists we interviewed said they delete tweets on a regular basis. Many interviewees suggested other journalists they knew also deleted tweets. The interviews indicate deletion can take many forms. Its extent varies between journalists, as do the tools they use, and the temporal patterns of their deletion practices. Nevertheless, a minority claim they delete rarely or never.

Many interviewees mentioned using a third-party service to delete tweets en masse. Some users (e.g. 4) noted the service they used was free, while others discussed using a paid service to delete large numbers of tweets at once. An examination of one service corroborates this claim as it found that a free service allowed up to 3200 tweets in total, while the paid version was unlimited (West, 2020b). ¹ Users report and our examination of the service corroborates that it allows users to mass delete “once only” or “automatically every few days.” The latter in combination with a setting of the “age of tweets to delete” creates a fixed temporal window (lasting between 1 week and 1 year) of published tweets, continuously trailing the present moment.

A smaller number of interviewees mentioned they delete some tweets from time to time for various reasons, with what seemed irregular frequency. When we asked interviewee 13 whether they deleted any tweets, their response was typical of a manual approach to deletion: “not in bulks but I delete some. Either something I kind of regret tweeting or just a tweet that got no activity at all . . . I just don’t want to clog up my timeline.” One female journalist (7) used Twitter’s own search function to identify what they viewed as problematic tweets:

Let me just double check that I didn’t like say anything totally out of character and crazy at some point . . . I searched like ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ and like a lot of like sexual terms . . . I like deleted some of the more like crazy stuff like just two or three tweets.

Those deleting large numbers of tweets at once, mentioned a particular service although some were vague about the name of the service and the extent to which they had shared their account data with the service. The following is a typical interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee regarding the service provider:

This vagueness suggests the deleting journalists viewed the practice as commonplace. While we shall discuss deletion reasons, many journalists related their decision to mass delete to other journalists’ experiences rather than necessarily to their own: “seeing so many people get burned by having all their old tweets up. So, finally, I installed tweet-delete” (15). Several interviewees including 14 had learnt colleagues were using this service, prompting them to adopt it: “I had seen a couple of people like um, recommend them [the mass deletion services].”

Journalists noted that these external services were more efficient than manual deletion: “one of my coworkers I think was saying she . . . searches by year and then like was manually deleting them and I’m like, that seems like it’s such a waste of time” (15). Another journalist (6) noted, “I’d tweeted so much over the years that I just decided I would use tweetdelete and nuke everything.” As 4 put it succinctly: “you could manually delete all your tweets, but nobody has the time or patience to manually delete 80,000 tweets.”

Some interviewees suggested automatic deletion was more acceptable than manual deletion: “I responded to this guy who was accusing me of selectively deleting tweets I thought made [me] look bad and I wanted to clarify. No, it wasn’t selective. I just deleted them all” (4). One interviewee (1) added, “I’m not like a person who’s like gone back and deleted a bunch of tweets to erase like the positions I’ve taken.” Another interviewee (14) contrasted the proactive positive outcome of mass deletion (“you’re starting fresh”) with the defensive process involved in manual deletion (“it’s not like picking and choosing”). We now turn to consider the reasons interviewees assigned to their decisions to delete or preserve their tweets.

Ephemerality

One thing that stood out from the interviews is that the majority of the informants perceive Twitter as an ephemeral platform. Many interviewees claimed that tweets, in the words of one interviewee (5), are “not written on stone, forever.”

Many journalists talked about their tweets as belonging to the particular moment in which they were created and that they do not want them “to live in the public forever.” This understanding allows them to tweet more freely, without being afraid that what they are currently tweeting will “come back later and bite me” (14). In that sense, as explained by a few informants, treating Twitter as an ephemeral medium (with the help of an external software that mass deletes their old tweets) changes the ways in which they are tweeting: “you can say this thing and then like it’s not going to follow you forever [. . .] it’s just in the moment and then it’ll go away” (14). Some journalists described the deletion of old tweets as a “fresh start” allowing them to feel safer and more confident while tweeting. Journalists emphasized that the value of Twitter lay in immediate consumption:

like, oh, I was offline. I went on vacation, but I came, I came back to work. I’m going to read Twitter from four weeks ago? No one would do that. But you would do that with a magazine . . . Like there’s something inherently more ephemeral about Twitter is it’s about what’s happening now and like it, it loses its value. (1)

Many informants described tweeting as a conversation and therefore not meant to leave a trail as most conversations do not. Interviewees perceived tweeting as a “live experience” (5), “a cocktail party conversation” or like “giving a talk. It’s ephemeral but you’re reaching people” (4). Although many informants acknowledge the role of Twitter in their journalistic work, most informants do not think of these tweets as part of the public record worthy of preservation.

The journalists we talked to distinguished between the stories they wrote, which they hope will survive “for history,” and their tweets which will probably disappear. Compared with tweets, which they described as “random thoughts or jokes,” the published stories are referred to as “my work,” and as “evidence.” As noted by one journalist (5) who mass deleted most of their tweets: “What I want to survive is my considered edited, thoughtful view. That’s the thing that should live on, I think.”

Harassment

One crucial motivation for journalists to delete tweets is harassment. Many informants reported harassment on various levels, from hate comments to receiving offending private messages. Others reported extreme cases in which they received messages threatening their family. This is how one male journalist described it:

I got a lot of antisemitic comments, graphics, you know, a few threats, physical threats and things like that. Um, my parents actually got a phone call as well, so that was pretty troubling . . . Um, but you know, once you kind of deal with that . . . you kinda get hardened to it. (13)

Although the incidents described in this quote are shared by a few of the journalists we interviewed, we found that the reaction to these experiences and the ways the informants described them to us varied. While the male journalists quoted above portrayed it as “annoying” or “kind of sad and even humorous” other journalists, and in particular female journalists, described it as a “terrifying” experience which made them feel “under attack.” Female journalists said they received a deluge of sexist tweets: “like tweets after tweets after tweets, look at her, like you can tell she’s Jewish like look at her big nose and that sort of thing [. . .] like come to my legs or just things like that” (15). Journalists often connected their own harassment experiences or that of others to their decision to delete tweets as a way to pre-empt future harassment. Deletion is a protection mechanism allowing them to have an online presence with little record of their past tweets which may put them and their families at risk. Some journalists described how they deleted tweets that received “unwanted attention.” This includes comments that were not labeled as harassment but indicated that they could probably presage it. Deleting tweets that received unwanted attention was a way to prevent that. Many journalists described how Twitter is easily “weaponized.” Other journalists described Twitter as a platform that cultivates a “gotcha culture,” or even as a “war zone” reflecting popular and scholarly accounts of the American public sphere as deeply polarized (Benkler et al., 2018). Some interviewees related harassment to a loss of control and deletion as a means of regaining it:

I remember feeling absolutely terrified because it seemed I couldn’t control it. It goes back to this thing about control where I could not control what people were sending me and it was coming in these massive volumes so every time, I’d refresh there’d be more and more, more [. . .] And to me tweet delete represents like a taking back of some kind of ownership of my online presence. (2)

Our findings indicated that some journalists who believed their old tweets had public value argued this was trumped by their personal safety. This was the main justification for deleting their own tweets and they also sympathized with other journalists who did so. As one female journalist noted,

But like for me, and I’m sure for like a lot of other people like you know we have to worry about ourselves and our own like, you know, immediate safety and like livelihoods and sense of safety and that sort of trumps any concern about like maintaining some sort of like future record. Right? Like especially in a time like now, when everything is so volatile. (14)

The differences between female and male journalist’s deletion practices stood out from the interviews. It is obvious from the interviews that women are more concerned with safety issues when they tweet. Furthermore, the male journalists we interviewed also reported that they assumed women are more exposed to online harassment. Many of them justified deleting tweets because of cases they heard of women being bullied: “I think especially women are worried that they’re going to attract the wrong kind of attention” (6). A few male journalists had this notion. Other White male journalists understood why journalists hailing from disadvantaged groups resorted to deletion. Our analysis suggests that such differential deletion practices, if they are generalizable, have important consequences for the public record.

Occupational considerations

Many of the interviewees related their decision to delete tweets or that of others to occupational factors. They emphasized that in a dynamic entrepreneurial labor market in which journalists changed employers and considered leaving journalism altogether, journalists had to minimize the risk that their past tweets might attract unwanted attention (as mentioned above) and eventually damage their job security and prospects. While some claimed they managed these risks by tweeting less frequently and more carefully, many others chose to delete some or most of their tweets to contend with these risks.

Journalists discussed occupational factors in relation to the full career cycle. Some suggested that individuals now contemplating a journalistic career who had a tweeting record stretching back into adolescence would probably delete their early tweets to hide immature behavior: “like some people started using Twitter when they were like, you know, 13, you know? . . . and thinking like I’m trying to start a career as a serious person and like I have all this like crap on my twitter feed” (16). While 16 was suggesting that other journalists might have used such a deletion strategy, another interviewee (1) noted that when he became a journalist, he deleted past posts which did not conform with his contemporary occupational identity.

For several of the interviewees, the reputational risks of past tweets did not recede as they established their careers because they perceived the journalistic labor market as unstable and competitive and believed hiring executives continuously monitored the online profiles of candidates and public reactions to these profiles:

the industry is so precarious right now and everybody is leaping from job to job in such a scary way that I think the market is just saturated with really talented people and you don’t want to give anybody even the slightest reason to not hire you. (6)

This interviewee (6) noted they had considered selective deletion of some tweets but realized “I’d never be able to go through cause I’d tweeted so much over the years that I just decided I would use tweetdelete and nuke everything.”

Another journalist (1) cited the case of a prominent journalist, Sarah Jeong, whose hiring to a prestigious position was severely criticized after right-wing activists re-posted tweets she had published years before (Cobb, 2018). She mentioned this case when discussing her decision to delete her own tweets in anticipation of future career developments:

I don’t want to have that happen to me. So it was a bit around that. I’m not saying that instigated it for me, but I’m saying that was definitely on my mind . . . that could prevent me from getting a job or make an editor thing.

This quote illustrates how journalists take into account the experiences of prominent journalists when they delete in a bid to avoid the difficulties those prominent figures encountered. A senior editor corroborated more junior journalists’ perceptions that employers used their twitter timeline to judge them: “It’s just like a sense of who they are and what they’re interested in” (10).

Journalists said they deleted tweets not only before or in anticipation of moves within or across news organizations but also as journalists considered exiting journalism to work in other fields. Interviewee 9 (and one other interviewee) highlighted the case of a well-known journalist turned political advisor who deleted a very large number of tweets a short time before his new position was announced. While some had publicly criticized this particular case, our interviewee suggested the decision to delete made sense:

it’s increasingly hard to remain in career-length journalism, very rare. And some of the best journalists I know, and the most opinionated by the way, have moved on, right? It [deletion] can give you freedom if you find the right kind of job.

Here, interviewee 9 suggested that having the individual freedom to delete tweets would allow journalists to safely pursue a career in a new field without being weighed down by past posts.

Many interviewees felt they had to manage risks alone and delete tweets they posted as journalists working for their employing news organization in the absence of any meaningful organizational support. While a senior editor (10) in a prominent news organization suggested her employer always supported her when she was attacked online, many more interviewees emphasized that their employers did not have the resources or inclination to support them. One journalist (9) noted,

when you’re under attack, you have no time to think about it. You need to defend yourself and you feel defenseless. And when you feel defenseless, you know, we’re not supposed to, you know, carry the burden of historical record on our own.

Journalists felt their employers “ill equipped and I have been dealing with this long enough that I know a lot better what to do and how to deal with it”(14), especially given that harassment was occurring online to workers working remotely. Interviewee 9 suggested that even powerful media companies did not defend their employees and, therefore, one should not expect weaker news organizations to be more protective.

Professional discourse as a resource for opposing deletion

A minority of journalists said they had not deleted in the past and would be wary of doing so in the future. Their explanations, we argue, illustrate how relatively powerful and autonomous individuals use professional discourse as a resource (Fine, 1996). Interviewee 17 emphasized their journalistic experience and frequent use of public records in their reporting and suggested this dependence meant “the idea of someone in my business or a journalist, like deleting the record is, I don’t, I can’t see doing that. And in fact like I think that it’s really sad.” They further emphasized how as a journalist they should be “held accountable” for what they publish. Interviewee 12, who emphasized his training at a prestigious news organization, also linked accountability with an opposition to deletion and minimized social media risks by mostly tweeting quotes of what other people were saying. Another journalist (10) who opposed deletion noted “the job of a journalist is to hold power to account,” even if they were attacked in response and argued deleting tweets would constitute caving in to “bad faith trolls.” Interviewee 8 argued that deletion contravened a journalistic commitment to transparency: “I think that transparency is such a huge part of journalism that deleting, once you delete something, you’re no longer being transparent.”

Why preserve?

Many interviewees discussed with us considerations for preserving their personal archives and motives to avoid deleting their entire tweeting history. Even journalists who eventually decided to use mass deletion services, for reasons detailed above, acknowledged the rationale for preserving tweets. One journalist even described how she had stopped using the mass deletion service for a while just to preserve a personal event she experienced and tweeted about in order not “to forget it.” Hence, one motivation to preserve tweets—or not to delete them—is to “not forget” meaningful events that were documented on Twitter. “I think it’s like an interesting record to have. I even like to go back sometimes, and I’ll be like, what was I tweeting six years ago today” (10). Another journalist (7) who did not use a mass deletion service noted, “I can use my own archives for not so much research, but like reference.”

In addition, since the journalists we talk to were screenshotting other tweets, they were aware that someone else might capture their own deleted tweets. Hence, one motivation to preserve tweets and avoid deleting them was the attention they might attract by the sheer act of deleting: “my worry is that if I delete it, it only brings further attention and then it can start a whole other round of uh ‘oh well she deleted it’” (10).