Deleting old tweets, Instagrams, etc.
 

I don’t have any social media accounts, unless you count PPOT. Anyway, I read how people have posted stuff that comes to light years and years later and it’s not flattering. Someone finds it and let’s the world know. The OP is all apologetic, that’s not me, I’ve matured, etc. and they’re fired.

So, can these tweets or whatever not be deleted or do people just forget they posted some offensive ****?

Of course, as I told my kids, don’t post **** you don’t want people to see. The web never forgets.

Sample: https://www.foxnews.com/us/crossfit-founder-apologizes-george-floyd-tweet-reebok

It really depends on who posted it. If it were you or I, once deleted, it probably wouldn't come back to haunt us.

The problem with celebrities (of almost any scale) is people see something and they immediately screenshot/tag/copy, etc and once that happens, they are screwed. There are literally bots out there that do nothing but copy celebrity tweets/instagrams/whatever the second they post so once they hit send, it's grabbed.

The real problem is nothing on the internet is ever really "deleted", especially when you're talking about Facebook or Twitter or any of the large companies out there. It might say "deleted" but it's somewhere on some database forever.

Storage is way too cheap to ever need to really delete anything these days.

This is an interesting issue. In the US, there is currently no way to ensure that this stuff is deleted. You put it out there, it's out there.

The EU is different. Under EU law, parties can petition Google to have data that is outdated, inaccurate, etc., removed. But--only in EU countries. The EU has no jurisdiction to require other countries, the US for example, to delete data. So they don't.

As you can imagine, this has become a gigantic additional expense to Google. Imagine the difficulty of moderating PARF, times, oh, about a trillion.

At most large businesses and universities nothing is ever truly gone.

My wife used to work at a university. When computers were first getting installed on the desktops of most employees in the offices they had a seminar from the legal staff. He put it real simply, before you type anything just remember it is all backed up by the servers. So just imagine someday sitting in court, on the stand, under oath and the penalty of perjury charges, and the lawyer asks you one this date did you type this statement.

She was always careful to not do anything that could come back to bite her. She never used work email for personal purposes. Since she was married to me, the geek, we had email accounts long before most people. She did little email until she got a cell phone.

My corporations kept everything... and I mean everything, permanently. Mind boggling amounts of server logs etc. Emails, etc. are trivial compared to firewall, VPN server logs (in intensive mode record) etc. backed up to other servers and/or tape. Now retrieving the data might be beyond most....but it's there...if you have the knowledge, skill set, processing power and $$$....btdt ;)

Wayback machine. Internet archive. Great resource, I have found product info and specs for companies long gone.

https://archive.org/web/

On a forum, I suppose one could become 'guest', disassociate the username, so the forum search doesn't work...

Then later sign up again, forever detaching old posts from that username.

;)

^^^^ but all could magically reappear with a few simple commands ;).

The last company I worked for in Entertainment took this very seriously. A customer could request a copy of everything we had on them and have all of it deleted. I know you can do the full data dump form facebook. I did mine and it was interesting to see what I was up to a decade ago and who I was chatting with etc.

Emp...