Why it is worth thinking about your old tweets – and then deleting them

Words should have consequences, writes Katy Brand, but they should also have context

Historical tweets have been in the news recently (AP)

One day last summer, I logged in to Twitter to find that someone whose name was anonymised had dug up a stupid joke I’d tweeted about Cheryl Cole about 11 years ago. They had clearly been trawling through my tweets, many, many thousands of them.

The joke referenced a news story I couldn’t remember, and so the tweet itself didn’t make a lot of sense to me in 2020. But suffice to say, it wasn’t terribly flattering to Cole. It wasn’t awful, but it probably wasn’t something I would tweet now, mainly because my days of starting public feuds with celebrities are over. I simply don’t have the energy.

It got me wondering, though, what other dumb stuff is back there in my tweet archive. In 2009 I had about 25 followers, all of whom I had met in real life. And to be completely honest I pretty much tweeted any old crap that came into my head. Now it is a very different beast. Words should have consequences, but they should also have context. That Cheryl Cole joke might have been brilliant in 2009. Now it just sounded like mean-spirited nonsense.