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

Abstract

Despite their ephemeral constantly changing nature, social media constitute an archive of public discourse. In this study, we examine when, how, and why journalists practice proactive ephemerality, deleting their tweets either manually or automatically to consider the viability of social media as a public record. Based on interviews conducted with journalists in New York City, we find many journalists delete their tweets, and that software-aided mass deletion is common, damaging Twitter’s standing as an archive. Through deletion, journalists manipulate temporality, exposing the public to a brief tweeting window to reduce risks and regain control in a precarious labor market and a harassment-ridden public sphere in which employers leave them largely unprotected. When deleting tweets mechanically, journalists emulate platform logic by depending—as commercial platforms often do—on automatic procedures rather than on human expertise. This constitutes a surrender of the very qualities that make human judgment so valuable.

How Disinformation on WhatsApp Went From Campaign Weapon to Governmental Propaganda in Brazil

“…We rely on expert interviews here since experts have at their disposal an “advantage of knowledge” (Meuser & Nagel, 2009, p. 18). The OOH is strategically ephemeral (Ringel & Davidson, 2022; Welsh, 2020) in that its existence is difficult to prove, and intentionally so. Therefore, harnessing the expertise of those who have attempted and/or succeeded in tracking and tracing its existence—journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers—becomes a key point of access and inquiry.…”

Manipulating Twitter through Deletions

“…Once a tweet is posted, it could be deleted for multiple legitimate reasons, for example, to correct mistakes, protect privacy (Ringel and Davidson 2020), or in regret (Zhou, Wang, and Chen 2016). Deletions can be performed by users through the Twitter app, website, third-party services (TweetDelete 2021; Matthews 2020), and the Twitter API.…”

Manipulating Twitter Through Deletions

“…Researchers have responded by developing algorithms for identifying different kinds of suspicious activities, for example, accounts controlled by bots (Yang et al 2019;Sayyadiharikandeh et al 2020) and groups of accounts coordinated to accomplish a task (Pacheco et al 2021). Most of these research efforts suffer from a common limitation, namely, the reliance on data provided by public APIs that exclude deleted content.…”