I have been on Twitter for over a decade, probably. I am too lazy to actually look up the date.
What I can tell you is I have went through about five phases on Twitter.
- 16-19. This is my "Sportsmen for Bush" era. I grew up in a relatively small town (population of 13k-ish). In my household, there was a gun behind the couch, praise for fiscal conservatism (though my parents were shy social liberals who were largely ahead of their time in supporting LGBTQ rights). I have no doubt that some of my tweets from this era were dumb as hell (or, to others, accurate as hell and I've simply lost my way!) But also, I learned a lot about startups in tech, and when my tweets about tech got a like or reply, it certainly served as the spark that changed my world view.
- 19-23. "Write drunk, edit sober," is a good summation of this period. I was too pre-occupied ignorantly self-medicating away my trauma, and when I did tweet it was likely under the influence of... something. After entering a particularly dark place, I went to a doctor. That doctor told me, gently, that I was self-medicating and should consider therapy. A couple of my more sober friends validated her assessment, flipping a switch. I started taking an anxiety med and decided to move to Oregon to add distance between who I was to (roughly) who I am today. I also cobbled together my first contract jobs: building WordPress sites (poorly), editing articles (poorly), and writing about startups (poorly).
- 23-27. I had gotten married! And at the same time, I had gone full liberal, and I wasn't afraid to tweet it. I also started connecting with folks in tech who cared about what I had to say, building up a steady amount of contract work.
- 24 -27. I had gotten my first full-time job in tech editing and writing about venture capital. I spent a lot of my time wrapping up my identity in my job, and my tweets reflected that. This is also when Trump had largely taken over the Republican Party, and what tweets that didn't center around startups and VC were most certainly bashing Republicans, bluntly. I had one critical tweet go viral, leading to at least a dozen attempts to invade my Google account.
- 28 to now. I would like to think this is the era of finding my voice and balance—with work, with relationships, and with Twitter. Being more conscious about what I was tweeting and generally putting out on the Internet became more of an ingrained habit rather than a conscious chore.
I write out these phases because they were all largely distinct, and I have absolutely no doubt I tweeted out ideas, perspectives, and made judgements that I most assuredly would be embarrassed to look at today.
To move past this, I have regularly cleansed my tweets with Tweet Delete since I was 24. At first, this went against my and my peer groups perspective on how the Internet culture should work—namely, what can be preserved should be preserved.
The first time I deleted my tweets, it ticked off a couple of large bloggers, who would now be more appropriately called influencers, for breaking their links and embeds.
That certainly impacted whatever brand I had been building, as these prominent bloggers would no longer link to my tweets.
I had broken their trust under the mental framework they operated in for how the Internet should work.
Yet it was also around this time that Twitter had departed from its "fail whale" era into a fully blown social media network that had achieved critical mass.
Suddenly tweets about eating too many blueberries were now alongside tweets aiming to overthrow regimes. And the first signs of "cancel culture," for lack of a less charged phrase, was beginning to rear its head.
I think it's fair to say the initial users of Twitter saw tweets as largely ephemeral, but they soon became very permanent with just a screenshot. Some of these were taken out of context, especially in the era of Twitter where "threads" were more of a hack than an actual feature.
For me, it became obvious that deleting my tweets was a necessary component of using Twitter safely, despite how mundane most of my tweets were.
But my anxiety in writing this post is mostly rooted in Elon Musk's fandom dredging up tweets from Yoel Roth, the former leader of Twitter's Trust and Safety team.
What largely appears to be the share of an article that simply laid out arguments of a unique court case had turned into suggestions and outright accusations that Roth actively ignored (or maybe supported!) CSAM on Twitter. It's a perception that had Jack Dorsey, Twitter's former CEO, defending Roth's team from the richest man in the world.
Dorsey attempted to change the narrative, and he largely failed to do so. And that's not overly surprising! It's hard to change perception, especially when that perception is validated by a man with more money than we can fathom and a fan base that has fueled his ascent to one of the most popular figures in our culture.
I don't think Roth actively thought the richest man in the world would fuel a movement that dove into his tweets all the way back to 2010. And it's incredibly unlikely it will happen to you.
But the fact is that it can happen to you, and if you've been on Twitter as long as I have, you should probably consider a soft reset and delete your tweets.