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.

And it made me think, why am I keeping all these tweets from way back then? What for? I am not anyone particularly important in the grand scheme of things. They are not a matter of public record. I am not planning to donate them to the British Library. They were merely off-the-cuff responses to current events.

There are a growing number of people in the public eye who have lost their jobs and opportunities over historical tweets. Of course, some of those tweets have expressed sentiments that were concerning, or downright offensive, and required attention and reprimand – then an apology in some cases, a pledge to do better, and potentially further action. I’m not trying to minimise the issues raised.

But I also know that I was a fundamentalist Christian at the age of 15 – if Twitter had been around then, I can hardly bear to think of the kind of sanctimonious rubbish I would have been putting out into the world in 240 characters or fewer. We all change and grow. Say sorry where you need to, learn your lessons, make amends and try to do better. And then delete your tweets. Holding on to them makes it look like maybe you still mean it.