Its right there in the privacy policy: https://twitter.com/en/privacy

> When you use features like Direct Messages to communicate, remember that recipients have their own copy of your communications on Twitter - even if you delete your copy of those messages from your account - which they may duplicate, store, or re-share.

> Does this genuinely surprise people or is it a slow news day at TechCrunch?

I was gonna say... I don't think techcrunch cares whether something is a story as much as they care whether it's a headline.

TechCrunch patting itself on the back.

The article actually starts by acknowledging that there used to be a feature called "Unsend", and that the issue being reported here is NOT about that. From what I understand, Twitter keeps storing messages that the _recipient has deleted_ even after the _sender account was closed_. I don't think it would be an unreasonable expectation to see these messages deleted from Twitter storage.

The question IMO is, at what point should you stop storing a message that no user can actually access anymore? That data is not good to keep for anyone, since both sender and recipient expressed a desire to delete it.

The same went for letters too, back when those were still being written.

With the difference being that nobody had a copy of your letters, just the recipient.

Not to sound like an ahole but I presume Twitter would argue it's __their__ message (in the sense that it's on their platform). with the sender and recipient having access to it. Once you hit submit you've forfeited "direct ownership" of the message.

AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) had a similar policy, which, I think, if I remember correctly, was a defining moment for AIM, and once again, for AOL.

The EULA for AIM was such that your messages became AOL’s intellectual property. Not only that you could not sue AOL Time Warner for possibly scripting and producing a movie and thus profiting from one of your instant message conversations or chat transcripts, but that maybe they could sue you for trying to do the same, and win.

I had this feeling, the moment that showed up in the news, that AOL’s days were numbered, and I was right. Other companies soon released chat functions, including Google and Facebook, and now AIM is gone. It was a signal that AIM was unsuitable for enterprise messaging, and no one excpet teenagers should bother with it, and wventually the teenagers that did use it, grew out of it, and moved on, and the rest is history.

Yeah Facebook also does the same thing, but the name is stripped out if the account no longer exists.

Yup. The last time I went to delete a DM thread a couple months ago FB gave me a warning that the delete was only from my end and that the thread would persist on the receiving end.

Then why, as mentioned in the article, does Twitter say the exact opposite?

>Once an account has been deactivated, there is a very brief period in which we may be able to access account information, including Tweets.

It doesn't. That's referring to account information broadly.

I included the relevant part of the quote:

>including Tweets.

As an example, you can delete your messages in telegram. Even in Slack. I think it is reasonable to allow user completely erase its own history from the server.

Nope, "your messages" once they have been received by someone now belongs to that person too. If you say something crazy to me, you shouldn't get to deny it by deleting your messages. If I levy an accusation, I should be able to prove it by showing my message history...

Screen it if you want. Why are you chatting with person who can say something crazy to you in the first place?

I don't treat this feature as something bad, maybe it was a typo in message or just miss-click, so, allow to modify it. Maybe I sent some intimate information and don't want to keep it in history but trust person wouldn't screen it.

How would you prove your message history was not adulterated? The easiest way would be to check the logs of the service itself, but what if those were deleted and only your local copy remains?

The judge would decide. If the app was on a secure platform (android/ios, non root/jailbroken), you could argue that the logs are genuine because the platform prevents you from manipulating the logs. The onus would be on the other party to prove that the logs were fabricated. I wouldn't count on it to secure a criminal conviction, but it would suffice in civil cases.

Those are chat services, which are obviously a different model. Twitter operates their DMs much more like mail or email. If you were allowed to delete the DMs you sent, you could easily threaten someone, then remove the offending message... which is exactly the issue they are having with harassment on the platform in its current iteration.

Maybe, instead of thinking that language is ephemeral, we should realize that what we say has lasting consequences. Maybe then we wont be so mad when we can't take what we said back.

What we say has lasting consequences, but we're not giving a deposition when socializing. We have no mechanism to show how we've evolved over time on any currently contentious issue - a weak "that was a long time ago" doesn't tend to matter. The ability to forget what is no longer important is a trait that is crucial to our brain function, and it stands to reason that it is crucial for a society.

I find Twitter DMs to be very much like a chat. It has the UI of a chat app and messages are stored on a centralized service. What makes it obviously a different model and more like email or mail?

It is indeed arguable what it looks like, but even within chat/IM applications, there is no consensus or convention on should the message be retractable or not. People shouldn't expect one or the other.

I wasn't making an argument either way about retracting messages. I was just surprised that someone would think that the DMs are obviously like e-mail when the UI looks like FB Messenger or Hangouts and message storage and transmission is controlled by a single company. I'm still curious to know how it's like e-mail.

Behaviour that I find user-hostile, and one of the reasons I prefer Signal and IRC over Telegram and Slack.

Should a person be able to delete an email they sent to someone else after the other person has received it? How about a letter you mailed? Should you be able to go into their house and take the letter back? It’s like trying to unring a bell. Once you send it, you no longer own it; the recipient does.

On the other hand, gmail keeps a copy of the received message in the receiver account, even if you delete the sender account.

Only for a limited amount of time after you send it, after I wanna say four hours it can no longer be deleted.

Pretty sure that's the case in MeWe too.