I am currently bedridden, suffering from ME and an as yet unidentified further illness. Twitter is my lifeline and is what has been keeping me sane, and I have managed to produce some ten thousand or more tweets in the last three months. Having finally given up any hope of managing to work, even through my computer from my bed, I have just started the process of applying for ESA and will be judged on whether I am fit to work or not before I can receive it.
I started to worry that my heavy use of twitter could be used against me in this process. I have already explained how and why I can use twitter without that meaning that I am fit to work, but I also worried that my tweets could easily be taken out of context. For example, a tweet about undertaking an activity of some sort could be used as proof that I can do that all the time. What an investigator would not see is how good or bad a day I was having, how much I had to prepare for and work around the activity, or how much pain and exhaustion that activity would cause for days afterwards.
I think the rumours of investigations into ESA claimants usage of social networks are probably not true, but I don’t want to take that chance. I do not have the energy to fight through an appeal should I be declared fit to work.
And so, on Thursday I took the drastic step of deleting all 12,272 of my tweets. I am fully aware that deleted tweets are not really deleted. Although they will no longer appear in my timeline, they are still there to anyone that knows the direct link to the tweet, they will still appear wherever they have been retweeted. (And some have been retweeted more than a hundred times.) They have been indexed by Google and by Topsy, and many others. What I have tweeted can be quite easily found by someone that is really determined, but I simply wanted to put my tweets beyond the reach of fairly incompetent researchers. Someone that I know has done the same thing to prevent trawling by tabloid journalists.
If you are interested in doing the same thing yourself for any reason, I used two tools to do the job. I had to use two because the first one did not work completely. The first was Twitwipe, found at http://twitwipe.com/ and the second was Tweet Eraser, found at http://www.tweeteraser.com/
—Addendum—
This post was intended as a quick explanation for friends that were asking my reasons, but has suddenly become rather popular and has had 500 views in a few minutes. The irony of this has been pointed out to me. If you are here investigating me, please make sure you read all my reasoning, and don’t misquote me.
Relevant earlier posts
If you can tweet you can work, and other such lies
You could also use http://tweetd.lt/ which is more basic than the others, but much faster.