He says that based on the recent debacles over Scientology (local councillor in Wales was taken to the standards board due to making a joke about that cult) and the Paul Chambers/Twitter Joke Trial (who was convicted for making a clearly jokey bomb-threat) it's good practice to regularly remove items from your Twitter feed, as long as it's not done to deceive.
In my view, that's the problem. It would be difficult to determine whether or not it was done in such a way. *
There's also the fact that, by Jack's argument, people should also delete blog posts and threads on messageboards, as soon as they're written. After all, what's to stop people issuing claims based on what's contained in those?
In any event, you shouldn't be encouraging people to delete evidence - it may come back to haunt you in the future - and in fact this was one of the issues in the Dave Osler and Alex Hilton cases: Ms Kaschke's post which they linked to disappeared for some unknown reason, which made it difficult to raise a defence.
Jack has said that he's happy defend anyone who is sued for anything written on their blog/Twitter, like he did with Osler and Hilton. While I fully support this sentiment - and am happy to help out in any way possible, should such claims be issued - I think that systematically deleting stuff in an attempt to head-off any potential issues is the wrong way to go about it.
In short: in my view deleting stuff can cause more problems that it solves, and it just looks dodgy!
* Note: I have deleted stuff in the past, but that's just been down to pressing enter too quickly, so the messages are garbled/littered with typos. Tweet
3 comments:
I think his point might be that if you always delete everything that's over time_period old, then you have a pretty robust defence against charges of either having permanently published something, or having deleted a tweet that's over time_period old for nefarious reasons. But I'm just guessing.
I don't think the #TweetDelete idea is the way forward and have to largely agree with you.
In addition to the inability to determine the intentions behind the deleting, the potential ways ones tweets could be stored outside of twitter (Google cached pages, screen grabs and 3rd party programs using the Twitter APIs) it really isn't possible to be certain about deleting tweets that have been active for more than a few minutes, even seconds.
I work with databases in my professional life and whenever someone 'deletes' a record from our databases, it isn't actually deleted. It is flagged as such, and thus is removed as far as the use is concerned, but none of the information is actually gone and in addition we record who deleted it and when. And I can't imagine Twitter is much different.
If outside sources had 'proof' of a tweet that had subsequently been removed I can see law enforcement and courts marking requests to see 'deleted' tweet from the Twitter databases if deletion becomes commonplace.
Whilst I can understand the idea behind #TweetDelete and might help the kind of retrospective offence seeking we saw in the #StupidScientology and #TwitterJokeTrial cases, in both these cases had the searches been done in Google and not Twitter itself then the tweets had been active far long enough to end up on the Google server caches (@GillianMcKeith found that out pretty quickly). The fact that they had been deleted by the users from their Twitter stream may make them look more guilty, not less.
In addition, those who are out to find people to complain about with these retrospective keyword searches (#StupidScientology are clearly up to this given that it took them 6 months to bring about their complaint against John Dixon) will develop tools to monitor tweets in real time instead. The APIs are all already there and are used by countless Twitter clients and developers can choose to ignore the 'delete' command passed to those APIs.
Go private or be careful what you write. Deleting it might not protect you in the way you might think.
As I mentioned before, in a case of defamation which gives an indication Johanna Kasch its links with the 70 terrorists in Germany two bloggers working
iPad Case
Post a Comment