[HN Gopher] Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
        
       Author : miduil
       Score  : 93 points
       Date   : 2021-04-05 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (archive.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
        
       | bern4444 wrote:
       | I wonder how this will jive with GDPR/CCPA right to be forgotten
       | laws.
       | 
       | If a person has the right to be forgotten, I can't imagine that
       | this decision will be allowed to continue for so long.
       | 
       | Does the person have to ask for their information to be deleted
       | under these laws? If so, this might be an additional avenue or
       | good next step for protection laws.
        
         | adolph wrote:
         | _Non-EU data processors are subject to the GDPR if their
         | business customer (data controller) is, according to the
         | triggers mentioned above. To give an example: an online
         | retailer based in the US advertises its products at Google
         | AdWords and targets consumers in the EU and therefore falls
         | within the scope of the GDPR. If the retailer uses the services
         | of a cloud provider to manage its EU customer information,
         | hosting of such data in the cloud will also trigger
         | applicability of the GDPR. The cloud vendor must comply with
         | the (limited) GDPR obligations for data processors._
         | 
         | https://www.eu-rep.global/blog/article/applicability-of-the-...
         | 
         |  _No. The CCPA does not apply to nonprofit organizations or
         | government agencies._
         | 
         | https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
        
         | gorkish wrote:
         | I really fail to see how these laws should or could
         | realistically apply to information that is published publicly.
         | 
         | It's reasonable to expect they have something to say about the
         | expectations and rights that a user of a platform ought to be
         | entitled to in their interaction with that platform. However
         | it's rather another thing to follow that this permission should
         | extend to anybody who legally can copy or retain that
         | information under the tenants of fair use or first sale
         | doctrine.
         | 
         | This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably
         | "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain
         | the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier
         | work in perpetuity. That is an absolutely ludicrous notion.
        
           | ivan_gammel wrote:
           | >This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably
           | "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain
           | the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier
           | work in perpetuity
           | 
           | No, it is not the same. An author of a published book has
           | intention to share it with the public and understands how the
           | system works: you would not expect from this person to make
           | any assumptions about the right to recall all the copies. An
           | author of a post in social media may not recognize the fact,
           | that the actual audience is beyond what he or she expected
           | and that he or she is not in control of the access to this
           | publication. The intentions and expectations are very
           | different, and it is not the fault of social media users that
           | they did not understand how to protect their privacy when
           | living the digital life.
           | 
           | The example with "public forum" is a good one here, because
           | speaking in public offline (e.g. having a conversation with
           | friends or addressing a crowd) does not imply that the exact
           | words or other details will be remembered and recorded, on
           | the contrary, without special effort taken by participants
           | any conversation is _not_ recorded by default. That said,
           | even if they are formally in their right and logically it
           | makes sense that whatever is posted with public visibility
           | should be expected to be copied and backed up, those archives
           | are still attacking the privacy and _should_ be regulated by
           | law. There 's much more public interest in that than in
           | preserving some tweets, because they may appear important for
           | history. After all, we spent thousands of years without
           | recorded evidence of what people talked about and we are
           | doing just fine.
        
             | gorkish wrote:
             | > An author of a post in social media may not recognize the
             | fact, that the actual audience is beyond what he or she
             | expected and that he or she is not in control of the access
             | to this publication.
             | 
             | I agree with you wholeheartedly were we discussing Facebook
             | or any number of platforms that give the user the ability
             | to restrict the audience to something that is not-quite-
             | public and not-quite-private. However outside of DMs
             | everything on Twitter is explicitly public.
             | 
             | I see the point of desiring some ability to have an "open
             | but private" conversation online, but again I really don't
             | think it applies to Twitter as it currently exists. There
             | are a lot of inequivalences when trying to apply the
             | aspects you describe from the real world onto the online
             | forum, not the least of which is the expectation of privacy
             | when posting a public tweet has been explicitly waived.
             | 
             | Should something like this exist? Sure, why not? For many
             | of us oldschool geeks, IRC was kind of like this, but
             | modern replacements like Discord and Slack take a
             | completely contrarian view and probably couldn't succeed
             | otherwise. Humans are still very much in the infancy of
             | what it means to extend society into cyberspace, and the
             | end result is increasingly looking like it's not going to
             | be the way any of us pictured it.
        
       | oytis wrote:
       | Clicked a couple of items - only metadata is available, other
       | items are "access restricted". I wonder how it works.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | paxys wrote:
       | It's weird to see the backlash against this when people here are
       | the first to speak out about the need to preserve the internet.
       | Like it or not, Tweets are part of the historical record, and I
       | welcome this move.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | abhayhegde wrote:
       | I wonder if that is really necessary. Sure, some accounts (like
       | politicians) may need to be preserved until their words may are
       | no longer significant, but why keep the random tweets of
       | irrelevant accounts.
        
         | EvanAnderson wrote:
         | The present doesn't know what the future will find valuable.
         | 
         | Put another way: Tomorrow's noteworthy person may be today's
         | nobody.
        
         | progval wrote:
         | It's sometimes easier to archive everything than to find/decide
         | what deserves to be archived.
        
       | fireattack wrote:
       | Does anyone test its completeness, especially for the older date?
       | 
       | Also, i can't seem to be able to download the actual data (only
       | the matadata), it says "Files marked with [lock icon] are not
       | available for download." at
       | https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_twitter_20210316071....
        
       | miduil wrote:
       | This makes it really easy to retrieve all previous tweets for
       | certain accounts just by accessing this URL:
       | 
       | https://web.archive.org/web/%2A/https://twitter.com/colorofb...
       | 
       | What's kind of worrying is also that most people who retrieve the
       | artifacts are bots, so clearly becomes an important data source
       | for others.
        
       | TedDoesntTalk wrote:
       | > Total Items 396,027
       | 
       | I don't think this is every tweet.
        
         | JosephRedfern wrote:
         | In this context, an item appears to be a multi-gigabyte
         | "megawarc" archive, rather than an individual tweet.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | sto_hristo wrote:
       | There is no escape from cancellation. 500 years from now, someone
       | running for a mayor of some colony somewhere in the Andromeda
       | galaxy will have his aspirations crushed because of something
       | their great*5 grandfather wrote on twitter.
        
       | elric wrote:
       | A couple of years ago, I discovered that archive.org had archived
       | an ancient (1998ish) personal web page of mine. Back when the
       | internet was a smaller, safer and simpler place. It contained a
       | bunch of personally identifiable information, including a phone
       | number and an address.
       | 
       | It took me _months_ to have it removed from their archive. They
       | are extremely (deliberately?) slow to respond to emails. They
       | ignore EU law (right to be forgotten, and in this case GDPR on
       | account of the PII). The domain no longer exists, and my
       | registrar doesn 't keep records older than 10 years because of
       | GDPR, so I couldn't use that as a way to prove the page was
       | actually mine. In the end I had to send them a DMCA takedown
       | notice, which only worked because the page footer had a
       | "Copyright Elric $lastname" notice. After another goodly while
       | they finally "removed" the page. I'm sure they didn't actually
       | delete anything, but only flagged the page not to be public.
       | 
       | If you have archived content which you can't conclusively prove
       | is yours, you're pretty much screwed. And it seems like you can
       | no longer prevent them from scraping your content, as they no
       | longer respects robots.txt. I suspect their crawlers aren't nice
       | enough to tell your their actual identity either.
        
         | mids_hn wrote:
         | I had screwed up by explicitly stating a Creative Commons
         | license on the page, so I'm certain that it's hopeless. Fuck
         | the Archive team, they can burn in hell. They are the epitome
         | of lawful evil.
        
       | rowanseymour wrote:
       | This reminds me I'm due a visit to https://tweetdelete.net/...
        
       | fireeyed wrote:
       | I wonder whether they will be able to archive deleted tweets. [1]
       | 
       | [1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/02/politics/kfile-neera-
       | tanden-d...
        
       | booleandilemma wrote:
       | I can't say I'm particularly excited about this. People are going
       | to tweet things at 15 years old that they're going to regret at
       | 30. Why should there be a permanent record of everything that was
       | ever tweeted? It just comes across as obsessive and black
       | mirror-y.
        
       | f38zf5vdt wrote:
       | It seems the whole world will have to relearn why forgiveness was
       | once a virtue the hard way. In the near term, it's causing a
       | bifurcation of society into people who exist and had an opinion
       | versus those who didn't, or those who didn't _yet_. In time it
       | seems like the former is just getting larger and larger.
       | 
       | Imagine how the field of mathematics would have evolved if we
       | simply cast aside those who had ever failed to solve a math
       | problem correctly. It needs to be okay for people to make
       | mistakes, otherwise we will never grow as a race.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | bityard wrote:
       | In 2021, I am a little surprised and amused to see so many people
       | who seem to be shocked (shocked!) that the things they post on
       | the Internet might get archived forever. Especially on HN, where
       | technological literacy tends to be a at least a little bit higher
       | than than the average tweeter.
       | 
       | Even back in the early days, it was a common-sense rule of thumb
       | that you never put something on the Internet that you wouldn't
       | want written in the newspaper about you, even in "private" forums
       | such as IRC channels and email. Let alone something as public as
       | twitter.
        
       | scandox wrote:
       | Never tweet. It may be meant ironically but it's a really
       | excellent piece of advice to keep in mind, even as you do in fact
       | tweet.
        
         | offtop5 wrote:
         | Well said, I stopped using Reddit and Twitter because I
         | realized a few things.
         | 
         | First arguing with other angry people all day has never
         | accomplished anything.
         | 
         | Second no matter what you say, in 10 or 20 years it might be
         | absurdly offensive and that can destroy your entire life. The
         | dumbest thing you ever said at 19 is a part of your identity
         | even when you're 42. But that only applies to the internet. If
         | I said something really horrible to you at a bar, the worst
         | that will happen is I'll probably just get kicked out.
         | 
         | I say that on Twitter, you can destroy my career for the rest
         | of my life
        
           | themarkn wrote:
           | It does seem like people ought to just think more about the
           | permanence of what we put online and act accordingly. There
           | is no way to guarantee ephemerality for anything you send to
           | another person online. They can always record or whatever in
           | some way. We have to act like this stuff is entered into the
           | permanent record and be OK with that. There is nothing we can
           | do to 100% prevent stuff being recorded somewhere.
           | 
           | I agree we'd all be better off not judged on our younger
           | attempts at "edginess" and stuff we said while figuring out
           | who we are in our teens. But at a certain point we have to
           | accept that posting anything online anywhere is _publishing_
           | and if you _published_ a racist letter to the editor at 19,
           | instead of said something offensive at a party, there is a
           | different judgement there & it's justified.
           | 
           | I do think in time the answer "I've grown a lot since that
           | time and regret those tweets" is going to become more
           | acceptable & people will be judged more on recent stuff they
           | say and do.
        
             | showerst wrote:
             | I wonder if we aren't at a bit of a unique moment in that:
             | 
             | 1. Norms around speech have changed quite a bit in a fairly
             | short amount of time.
             | 
             | 2. For the first time, we have a group of adults who were
             | largely on the internet as young people.
             | 
             | I think kids today are being raised to be much more
             | cognizant of what they post online, (and what they say in
             | general) so we just had this window from like 96-2015 or so
             | where people where encouraged to post just about anything
             | casually to the internet, and yet south-park style
             | offensive comments were still ok for many kids.
             | 
             | Obviously there's always going to be some edgy-kids saying
             | stupid stuff, and I daresay _most_ young people will say
             | something regrettable if you record them for long enough,
             | but this might be a really large cohort.
        
       | baby wrote:
       | Oh no
        
       | vxNsr wrote:
       | Well I guess I'll be forgetting my account creds.
        
       | snicksnak wrote:
       | Of course this will get weaponized, if it isn't already.
       | 
       | We've seen time and time again that a vile old tweet in the wrong
       | hands can be very powerful, it's a ticking time bomb. Think 5 or
       | even 10+ years down the road, some of the kids who are edgy on
       | twitter today might go in to politics or hold some other high
       | level position.
       | 
       | I don't think the current climate is going to cool down anytime
       | soon, but maybe something like this will either lead to mutually
       | assured destruction or, what I'm hoping for, old tweets losing
       | their power in the long run.
        
         | temp8964 wrote:
         | But the root of the problem is not the technology, it is the
         | people and the culture.
         | 
         | I have no doubt, using tweets to cancel people is a deliberate
         | tactic of the far left activists to win the culture war. And
         | they are winning, a lot.
         | 
         | After a few more decades, cancel the First Amendment and put
         | people in prison bc of wrong speech is not impossible. Right
         | now the focus is race, gender, identity politics, but it can be
         | easily switched to economic issues. Dark days are ahead of us.
        
           | jelsisi wrote:
           | although I hate the aspect of cancel culture where someone's
           | tweets from several years ago are pulled up to destroy their
           | career, I think a lot of the stuff around race, gender, ect.
           | is headed in the right direction. We are at a point where
           | hating on an group of people is simply not o.k. and I think
           | the repercussion are fair (although it is socially acceptable
           | right now to hate on white people, I view this as an
           | overcorrection that will go away soon)
        
             | temp8964 wrote:
             | So maybe send them to prison for a few months / years or
             | fine them a few thousand dollars is even better than
             | destroy their career?
             | 
             | Also, how about climate deniers, people say anti-union
             | things? They will be handled in the next round.
        
         | AzzieElbab wrote:
         | check out this gentleman https://gist.github.com/travisbrown
        
           | snicksnak wrote:
           | yeah, there is whole army of those brave speech police
           | officers out there
        
         | gentleman11 wrote:
         | High level position? What about automated scrapers and
         | personality algorithms selling profiles to your future
         | employers and insurance companies 20 years later? "This person
         | used to swear a lot, which means they are more likely to be
         | hiding <some condition> that <the data purchaser> is concerned
         | about." In the gig economy, everyone is a brand that has to be
         | built up and that can be torn down
        
         | javajosh wrote:
         | On the bright side it will be an interesting way to analyze how
         | people's views change over time, seeing how they tweet over a
         | long period. Note that the same tool that can condemn a person
         | can also exonerate them: if they were once upon a time filled
         | with hate an ignorance, and then over time changed, you can
         | _show_ this path convincingly with a full tweet history. But
         | yeah I hope the power to quote out of context to hurt people
         | fades, and quickly.
        
           | throwawayboise wrote:
           | Look at the media today. Very little is reported in full
           | context. It's carved up, and presented in little snippets to
           | imply something different, often with the intent to provoke
           | outrage in the audience. No confidence that this will change;
           | it is only going to get worse.
        
         | showerst wrote:
         | I suspect that as a larger and larger percent of the population
         | has a cringey internet past to look back on, the power of old
         | tweets will fade somewhat. It'll take a while though, and of
         | course depends on how vile the past actions are.
        
           | jelsisi wrote:
           | I feel like this is an optimistic take. I know a strong
           | number of people that have never thought up a controversial
           | opinion in their life. They will always have that power over
           | the rest of us.
        
             | showerst wrote:
             | I see it sort of like pot smoking. In about a two decades,
             | we went from "probably the most dangerous drug in the
             | United States today" (Reagan), to "I smoked but I didn't
             | inhale" (Clinton) to "Of course I inhaled, that was the
             | point." (Obama).
             | 
             | It's not that pot suddenly epically skyrocketed in the
             | voting-age population, it's just that enough people either
             | had smoked pot, been around those who did, or watched media
             | that made light of it to realize it wasn't a 100% mark of
             | evil.
        
           | KiranRao0 wrote:
           | I wish I held that view.
           | 
           | My view is that the majority of people will self-censoring
           | and be too afraid of saying anything remotely controversial.
        
       | iJohnDoe wrote:
       | Is this really necessary?
       | 
       | People need to be careful what they post online, but come on. Do
       | they really need to archive every tweet?
       | 
       | Seems like they are taking their mission too far. Archiving every
       | post from Usenet dating channels from 20+ years, every tweet,
       | etc. Seems a bit excessive at this point.
       | 
       | This also can't help with the social cooling.
        
         | causasui wrote:
         | Whether or not every tweet in existence _should_ be archived is
         | irrelevant. The fact is they _can_ be, so they should be
         | treated as though they _will_ be.
         | 
         | Saying "no please don't" will never stop something that is
         | technologically possible from happening. Murphy's law applies
         | here and everywhere in tech (and frankly, in most areas of
         | life).
        
           | the_local_host wrote:
           | Even if obtaining old tweets was theoretically always
           | possible, actually facilitating this seems like a combination
           | of poor judgment and obsessive hoarding.
           | 
           | If the "smattering of tweets" means everyone's tweets will be
           | publicly available in perpetuity, then this is a downright
           | _inhumane_ policy, and should not be pursued by any
           | organization worthy of respect.
        
           | EvanAnderson wrote:
           | Thank you for articulating this. I was trying to, and failing
           | miserably.
        
       | ajayyy wrote:
       | To clarify: Archive Team IS NOT Archive.org.
       | 
       | Archive team is a loose collection of volunteers, you can learn
       | more and help out at https://archiveteam.org or by joining their
       | channel on IRC.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Thanks--we've changed the title above to that of the page.
         | 
         | Submitted title was "Archive.org is archiving every tweet". The
         | word "smattering" implies much less than "every". What's the
         | actual situation?
        
         | larrik wrote:
         | I'm not seeing any reason on the site to think otherwise, can
         | you elaborate?
        
           | ajayyy wrote:
           | Archive team just uploads data to archive.org. See the note
           | at the footer of https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
        
       | drivingmenuts wrote:
       | Or, and here's a revolutionary thought, we teach people to think
       | before they open their goddamn idiot pieholes?
       | 
       | Impossible, I know, but still a goal worth aiming at.
        
       | hexandcube wrote:
       | If that's true, I'm deleting my Twitter account.
        
       | pasttense01 wrote:
       | Basically people should be posting anonymously on the internet
       | (via distinct handles with no connection with one's real name),
       | as is done in Hacker News (although a small percent do post
       | enough details in their posts to connect with their real name).
       | Lots of us started out posting with our real names in the last
       | century (on Usenet for example) and after a while realized how
       | poor an idea this was.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | For the most part, if I don't want something linked to my name,
         | I don't write it.
        
       | buss wrote:
       | Well I guess it's good that they're also going to be archiving
       | Jason Scott's mean and abusive tweets. How archive.org doesn't
       | reign in his behavior when he is such a publicly well known
       | figure is beyond me.
        
       | oytis wrote:
       | A good reminder not to put things on other people's computers if
       | you don't want these things to be on other people's computers.
        
       | kmfrk wrote:
       | Datasets like these feel like a recording of every conversation
       | in a coffee shop: technically public, but practically private for
       | the most part.
       | 
       | Feels super gross to see.
        
         | EvanAnderson wrote:
         | How has Twitter ever been "practically private"? We're talking
         | about tweets-- not direct messages.
        
           | dustinmoris wrote:
           | Doing things in a public place != Doing things publicly
           | 
           | You can do things with a sense of privacy in a public place.
           | When I was young I bought and smoked a lot of weed privately
           | in the middle of a public square.
        
           | harperlee wrote:
           | If 10 people follow you, then you are talking with family,
           | not broadcasting to a nation, in practice. The audience can
           | change when years pass.
        
             | EvanAnderson wrote:
             | Misunderstanding the medium doesn't change what it is,
             | practically speaking.
        
               | coldpie wrote:
               | Humans aren't perfectly informed and sometimes they make
               | mistakes.
        
             | fabatka wrote:
             | But even then you know your tweets _can_ be read by
             | anybody. If a platform is fundamentally public, I don 't
             | understand how can anyone use it as a form of private
             | communication.
        
               | harperlee wrote:
               | Well it's human nature, really. You are not constantly
               | stepping back and rationally evaluating the present
               | moment. If you have a small bunch of followers and you
               | start a conversation with them, the topic can evolve
               | towards more sensitive matters. Kind of like with
               | normalization of deviance in privacy terms. You just
               | focus on the content of the conversation. As soon as you
               | are answering to anyone, your mind focuses on only that
               | person who said something to you.
               | 
               | Criminals post Facebook photos with evidence of their
               | crimes constantly, as another example.
        
               | fabatka wrote:
               | Thanks, I can see your point better. I guess my real
               | concern is about Twitter being considered the default
               | communication channel for many people. I mean it is
               | perfect for getting updates from orgs/teams the quickest
               | way possible, but to use it as a forum... for me it is
               | incomprehensible.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | nanna wrote:
       | Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more
       | than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded
       | for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then
       | sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to
       | them. But unless you're someone that people really care about -
       | it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that
       | means something problematic was tweeted but lost, then so be it.
        
         | entropie wrote:
         | But tweets can be important. Who decides whats important and
         | therefore needs to be archived and what not? No one. In the
         | digital age harddrive capacity is basicially infinite so we
         | save everything.
        
         | EvanAnderson wrote:
         | This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak
         | in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the
         | case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital
         | technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory
         | isn't a new thing.
        
           | mdoms wrote:
           | This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.
        
             | EvanAnderson wrote:
             | Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my
             | words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words
             | you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take
             | that into consideration.
             | 
             | That seems pragmatic and polite to me.
        
               | coldpie wrote:
               | The ability to broadcast some random thought you have to
               | everyone on the planet, publicly archived and attached to
               | your name, for all of eternity, is a new ability. We've
               | never had it before, and we're discovering the
               | consequences of that. I think it's reasonable to have
               | some disagreement about how that ability should be
               | handled without reducing that disagreement to whether or
               | not words have consequences (obviously they do).
        
               | EvanAnderson wrote:
               | I don't think there is any useful conversation to be had
               | re: "forgetting" that public data. It's a matter of fact.
               | Once data is public it's public. There no magical
               | "forgettable" bits for special classes of digital data.
               | 
               | Deleting copies pof data from public and quasi-public
               | forums isn't practically possible, short of taking away
               | everybody's general purpose computer. I don't think
               | that's going to happen (and I certainly wouldn't want it
               | to).
               | 
               | I think it's just a world we have to live with. I don't
               | particularly _like_ it, but I don 't have a choice in the
               | matter.
        
               | harperlee wrote:
               | On one hand, that's true. On the other hand, 10 years
               | down the road, all you have is 140 characters, and you
               | lose the whole context in which something was written.
               | You know, "Qu'on me donne 6 lignes ecrites de la main du
               | plus honnete homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire
               | pendre" and all that.
        
               | showerst wrote:
               | In this context, we're specifically talking about young
               | people, who are _literally not yet wired_ to properly
               | evaluate consequences. It doesn't mean they get a pass
               | for anything, but surely at some point in your life
               | you've said/done something that wouldn't pass with modern
               | standards, particularly if it can be cherry picked to the
               | word.
        
               | vlquant wrote:
               | Everyone is triggered by different things. Your
               | bureaucratic style "words have consequences" sends
               | shivers down the spines of many people who grew up in the
               | Eastern block.
               | 
               | We know the language that precedes cancellations by now.
        
               | totalZero wrote:
               | The "words have consequences" line of thinking doesn't
               | provide a rationale for the consequences. It is simply a
               | way of avoiding critical thinking about harsh reactions
               | to unpopular statements. You might as well say, "all
               | fallout is good fallout."
               | 
               | Quoting Mohandas Gandhi: "Freedom is not worth having if
               | it does not connote freedom to err and even to sin. If
               | God Almighty has given the humblest of His creatures the
               | freedom to err, it passes my comprehension how human
               | beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight
               | in depriving other human Beings of that precious right."
               | 
               | Most of those words that have "consequences" nowadays
               | aren't unlawful or even particularly malicious, and some
               | are in fact just jokes and statements of opinion that go
               | against the grain of the zeitgeist. Often, the reaction
               | is more damaging than the words themselves.
        
               | 1123581321 wrote:
               | The trouble with that is that the old tweets from an
               | immature brain are amplified beyond their original
               | context, intentionally, so that they hurt a lot of
               | people, and then a punishment is applied as if the author
               | had just deliberately blasted the world with their remark
               | yesterday. People are using the private conversation
               | analogy because so many teens just meant to write to a
               | few friends or use it as a sort of diary. To make them
               | responsible not only for their youthful immaturity their
               | whole life, but for any mental health struggles, and for
               | not having a perfect understanding of the nature of the
               | service, is cruel and non-productive social behavior from
               | the adults.
               | 
               | You're having trouble understanding because you are only
               | imagining yourself making these decisions, and you are a
               | fully grown adult who handles life's pressures well and
               | you understand Twitter from a product perspective. You
               | will need to consider how others use the service to
               | understand why expecting perfect behavior across every
               | person's entire life is unwise collective behavior.
        
               | EvanAnderson wrote:
               | Yours and so many other posts here seem like an argument
               | for now allowing children to use these kinds of services.
               | 
               | It also sounds like parenting needs to take into account
               | this new reality. To the extent that it applies in my
               | household I know my wife and I are.
        
               | 1123581321 wrote:
               | I'm neutral on a legal intervention but I certainly agree
               | parents should heavily educate and be restrictive until
               | enough has sunk in. We do similarly with our family.
               | 
               | My main concern here is to explain why a young person's
               | use should not be treated like the use of a sophisticated
               | social media user who is older and more mature.
        
             | SamBam wrote:
             | Why? If what's being held against you later is so awful
             | that it can't be explained away with "I was immature"/"I
             | was angry in the heat of the moment"/"I have since learned
             | that that's not correct," then it must have been a pretty
             | toxic thing to say in public.
        
           | jowsie wrote:
           | The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years
           | ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on
           | the internet movement so we get judged by how we are now, not
           | how we was as kids. While I agree people should be held
           | responsible for things they say/do, I also think that at this
           | exact moment in history, people give little to no thought to
           | the idea that people change/grow as they age. Just look at
           | Jenna Marbles on YouTube, she's in self exile because she
           | wore too much fake tan in a video from 10 years ago.
        
             | wott wrote:
             | > The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+
             | years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put
             | everything on the internet movement
             | 
             | Well, I found some of my conversations on BBSs or Fidonet
             | from over 25 years ago are now on the Web...
             | 
             | So what you say was right as long as it was indeed just
             | 'said', but as soon as something was written and/or
             | recorded somewhere, it may resurface on the Internet one-
             | day, even though it was never intended to appear on the
             | Internet.
        
             | crocsarecool wrote:
             | Agreed! I don't even know stuff is wrong or insensitive
             | sometimes. Someone recently told me not to say the word
             | "Jew." I wasn't saying it in a bad way - we were discussing
             | a friend who is Jewish, but I didn't know just saying the
             | word "Jew" could possibly be taken badly.
             | 
             | When I was younger, I said something about a "Jap." I
             | honestly was just trying to take a shortcut by saying Jap
             | instead of the full "Japanese" like saying burger instead
             | of hamburger. I got a shock when I was told that was bad.
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | I suggest email for such a use case. To have public
         | conversations is to open the door to public criticism in
         | perpetuity of what was discussed.
         | 
         | https://definitions.uslegal.com/n/new-york-times-rule/
         | 
         | "New York Times rule is a commonsense rule of ethical conduct
         | that a person should not do anything arguably newsworthy in
         | public or in private that one would mind having reported on the
         | front page of a major newspaper. The rule ultimately protects
         | defamatory falsehood.
         | 
         | New York Times rule is also known as New York Times test or New
         | York Times v. Sullivan rule."
        
           | SamBam wrote:
           | > _or in private_.
           | 
           | Not sure how email is an answer. It sound like the rule is
           | "don't do/say it at all, if you didn't want it to be public."
        
             | throwawayboise wrote:
             | It used to be that a private conversation with another
             | person was private. At worst, it was "one person's word
             | against another" so you could operate on a basis of "don't
             | write it down" if you wanted something to be private.
             | 
             | Not sure how much longer that will be the case. People will
             | soon be walking around with the personal equivalant of a
             | police officer's body camera, always on, recording every
             | moment and every interaction with another person.
             | 
             | I would be reluctant, and probably refuse to talk to anyone
             | wearing such a device, but it won't be long before it's not
             | even obvious.
        
               | ghaff wrote:
               | I wouldn't be surprised at all if, at some point, a lot
               | of people routinely wear some sort of AR when out in
               | public. It's possible there will be widespread social
               | pushback (i.e. the Glasshole factor). But I wouldn't bet
               | on it if such a thing were genuinely comfortable and
               | useful.
        
             | toomuchtodo wrote:
             | In a sense. My point is, you cannot have public
             | conversations and then be aghast when they are stored or
             | captured for later retrieval and critique. That's not a
             | logistics and storage issue, that's a breakdown of critical
             | thinking and nuance in the public sphere (where rational
             | participants would view a tweet or tweet discussion
             | contextually and within the time it occurred, as opposed to
             | present day outrage porn fuel).
             | 
             | The archiving should happen, even if the corpus must go
             | into cold storage ("unavailable to the public") until a
             | time more reasonable, civil discourse over the contents can
             | occur, but those who participate in online conversations
             | should do so cautiously for obvious reasons.
             | 
             | Tangentially, "never put something in writing you wouldn't
             | want to see on the front page of a newspaper" is just good
             | life advice. Have a phone call or in person meeting
             | instead.
        
         | contravariant wrote:
         | Perhaps, but is it really all that surprising that something
         | not merely said but broadcast to the entire world is remembered
         | in perpetuity?
        
         | lifthrasiir wrote:
         | The very presence of retweets and likes means they can't ever
         | be treated like verbal conversations. It is a written record
         | mistaken as ephermeral one, period.
        
         | saon wrote:
         | This kind of thing can never be materially accomplished though.
         | Whenever you post something publicly to the internet, any
         | recipient can back it up indefinitely, separately from the
         | origin network. This is a fundamental material reality. No
         | amount of legislation or centralized control of the content can
         | overcome it.
         | 
         | Ultimately people will have to culturally/collectively get over
         | everyone's internet past, change their own behavior after
         | understanding this new reality, and deal with the consequences
         | of their speech. Even if it were possible, having the ability
         | to remove all copies of past speech would probably produce
         | worse social outcomes. I think I'd rather deal with a person's
         | complicated history, than a history that has been selectively
         | revised to deceive me.
         | 
         | Private, perishable communication is only possible peer-to-
         | peer, through a secure tunnel or network you own, with a person
         | you trust to delete it. The same applies to verbal speech
         | honestly, if you tell somebody something in confidence, it's up
         | to them not to tell anybody else. People just need to accept
         | that using twitter is like making a press release and not like
         | talking to some friends.
        
         | chrisdone wrote:
         | The Economist stylized this as "tweets are appraised as speech,
         | but punished as writing."
        
         | tw04 wrote:
         | But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop
         | treating them like they are. It's no different than going to
         | your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders,
         | and making a bunch of stupid statements.
         | 
         | Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely.
         | Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager
         | and judge me for it? Absolutely not.
         | 
         | Which is EXACTLY why I personally think society should just not
         | allow people under about the age of 25 to even be on social
         | media in the first place. I know, I know, that will never
         | happen because _insert reason_ - but if we don 't want
         | everyone's actions to be recorded in perpetuity we should
         | probably stop allowing them to post those actions in a forum
         | that's open to the entire world and easily recorded. You can
         | make laws until you're blue in the face, it's not going to stop
         | an individual from saving whatever stupid thing you said or did
         | and leaking it anonymously should the moment present itself.
        
           | wmichelin wrote:
           | This is why Snapchat became popular, and everyone seems to
           | have forgotten the value in that feature-set. Instagram
           | blatantly cloned half of the Snapchat feature-set and
           | Snapchat itself has also gone to shit.
        
           | elric wrote:
           | So your answer to "young people doing dumb things" is banning
           | young people from doing dumb things until they reach
           | $arbitraryAge? That seems unlikely to happen.
           | 
           | There's a difference between 200 people in a square watching
           | and filming you, and between an organization doing the same
           | thing _and then making it available to all of mankind for the
           | rest of time_.
        
             | tw04 wrote:
             | Yes... We ban children from doing all sorts of things until
             | they're an appropriate age to make better choices. From
             | getting married to driving to smoking cigarettes.
             | 
             | As I said, I doubt it will happen, that doesn't mean it
             | shouldn't happen.
        
           | jelsisi wrote:
           | One of the first things I did when I graduated from high
           | school was delete my twitter account. It was in an effort to
           | get myself together and become more focused in school. Seeing
           | people's careers damaged by tweets when they were kids makes
           | me feel more and more that deleting my account was one of the
           | best decisions I have made.
           | 
           | If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other
           | parents to prevent them from joining any social media before
           | they turn 16.
        
             | throwawayboise wrote:
             | > If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with
             | other parents to prevent them from joining any social media
             | before they turn 16
             | 
             | Honestly that seems unlikely. If all their friends are on
             | some platform they will find a way to be on it also. Best
             | you can do is really try to educate them on how badly
             | things can boomerang and that the internet never forgets.
             | But even at 16, most kids don't have the life experience
             | and perspective to really understand this.
        
           | dustinmoris wrote:
           | > It's no different than going to your local public square
           | full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of
           | stupid statements.
           | 
           | I'm afraid it really isn't the same at all. Even when I was
           | 25 I did stupid things. I would get drunk in a night club,
           | like everyone else in my age, and on our way home we might
           | have a piss in the middle of a big public square at 4am
           | because we were drunk and stupid. Does that mean I would also
           | get my bits out in the middle of a public square when there
           | are 200 people staring at me? No.
           | 
           | Doing or saying things in a public place != Publicly saying
           | or doing things
           | 
           | You can do private things in a public place, and that's how
           | many people with a very small following feel on social media.
        
             | ASalazarMX wrote:
             | They're doing public things, regardless of their feelings.
             | They could publish with more privacy if they wanted, but
             | there's always the desire of winning the five minutes of
             | fame lottery.
        
       | gentleman11 wrote:
       | This is a bit tangential, but I wish we weren't seeing links to
       | tweets showing up as hn stories. It's not a legitimate news
       | source, and it bans people left and right for nothing because
       | they have such serious botting and conspiracy theory problems
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | HN isn't just for discussing "legitimate news sources"
         | (whatever that even means). People can post anything they want
         | from any source.
        
           | gentleman11 wrote:
           | You can't say anything of substance in 280 characters, or
           | find room to cite references. It's just a bunch of
           | disembodied statements meant to go viral to build peoples
           | followings or get people mad, with no meaningful discussion
           | back and forth (for the same reasons). Maybe I'm just getting
           | old, but Twitter seems like a bad way to get and share
           | information, even without the random bans. Apologies if I
           | just haven't seen the good parts of Twitter yet
        
             | paxys wrote:
             | That is debatable (I personally don't agree with your view
             | at all), but regardless people are still allowed to post
             | and discuss meaningless content here.
        
       | dustinmoris wrote:
       | What are the legal implications of this in regards to the right
       | of being forgotten, copyright laws or even the simple issue of
       | moderation? For example if someone posts a hateful tweet or some
       | extremist content (e.g. photos of terror, etc.) which goes
       | against the law (and therefore gets taken down by Twitter) is it
       | not reprehensible if archive.org is re-publishing such content?
        
         | mvzvm wrote:
         | The reprehensible act is the tweet. Keeping records and
         | archives of what people do in a public forum is not.
        
           | secondcoming wrote:
           | But what is not considered reprehensible today may be
           | considered reprehensible tomorrow.
        
           | dustinmoris wrote:
           | I disagree. Twitter often takes content down which is very
           | problematic, including of very serious sexual and criminal
           | nature and even other non criminal content such as self
           | harming content by children or other people who go through
           | troubling times. Not everything is a Donald Trump tweet and I
           | see serious problems by a blanket unmoderated archive.
        
       | adamrezich wrote:
       | the only reason one could be concerned about/afraid of this is if
       | they recognize that the window of politically acceptable thought
       | is shifting faster than ever these days, such that today's
       | seemingly levelheaded opinion could be cause for cancellation
       | years down the road. _that_ should be the actual cause for
       | concern, not the fact that things that were publicly posted to
       | the Web are being archived.
        
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