Social media usage is ubiquitous. Today, we can see and comment on all we want with the world through platforms such as Twitter about our thoughts and opinions. A tweet can be spread very far across the internet with only 280 characters.
Hasty tweets, though, can put their authors in legal trouble. Since tweets are of course public, they can be the subject of evidence in any case taking place in court, for example, defamation, copyright violation, threats, and so on. Therefore, this question must be resolved – can getting rid of a problematic tweet save you from ending up in court?
How Deleted Tweets Are Stored and Can Be Recovered
When you send out a tweet, it becomes part of Twitter’s vast database stored across its servers. Simply pressing the delete tweets option does not erase them from existence. Twitter maintains deleted tweets in backup storage for a certain period ranging from days to years.
Twitter also sends tweets to third-party partners and analytics services that may preserve copies independently. There are even services that automatically archive all public tweet data for research and monitoring purposes.
This means your deleted tweets still exist in multiple places—they are simply no longer visible on Twitter itself. However, with the right legal procedures, investigators and lawyers can retrieve deleted tweets from Twitter’s backups and third-party archives.
Data Retention Policies
Twitter’s data retention policies determine how long they keep copies of deleted tweets. Currently, their policy is to store deleted tweets for up to 30 days post-deletion.
So if you delete a tweet that gets you in legal trouble within 30 days, investigators can subpoena Twitter to recover and produce that tweet.
However, Twitter used to have a longer retention period of over a year for deleted tweets. Up until late 2017, deleted tweets were kept in backups for as long as 540 days before being permanently erased.
So for older cases, lawyers were able to subpoena tweets deleted even 18 months prior with a simple data request to Twitter.
Third-party Data Archives
Even after Twitter permanently deletes a tweet after 30 days, copies may still be obtained from third-party sources.
Many analytics companies automatically archive tweets posted by their clients for years to generate historical reporting. Marketing platforms need to store tweet data to measure performance over time. Data brokers gather vast amounts of public tweet data that they can sell to clients.
All these third-party stores of tweets remain unaffected when you delete a tweet on Twitter. A subpoena or court order sent to any platform retaining archives of your deleted tweets can compel them to hand over the evidence.
How Tweet Deletion Works
To understand how deleted tweets be recovered, it’s important to understand how deleting a tweet works behind the scenes.
When you delete a tweet, Twitter does not instantly purge it from its servers. They simply mark the tweet as deleted in their databases. It remains stored in their servers but is filtered out of public view on Twitter.com and Twitter apps.
The deleted tweet stays in this obscured state until Twitter runs data-reaping processes that permanently remove expired deleted tweets at regular intervals.
So tweets don’t vanish instantly. They are briefly kept in a deleted limbo where they are inaccessible to the public but can still be retrieved by Twitter and law enforcement for a limited period through backend access.
This window between tweet deletion and reaping allows deleted content to be recovered as evidence before it’s gone forever.
Limitations Around Using Deleted Tweets as Evidence
While deleted tweets may be resurrected as evidence, there are certain limitations to their admissibility and usage in legal proceedings. Opposing counsel can object to submitting deleted tweets as evidence based on the following grounds.
- Relevance. For any content to be accepted as evidence in court, it must be relevant to proving or disproving the facts at issue in the case. Opposing lawyers can argue that just because deleted tweet history is recoverable does not make every old post relevant to the lawsuit.
- Prejudice. In some cases, recovered deleted tweets may not add any substantive value. They may only embarrass defendants or unfairly sway sentiment against them. This makes the evidence objectionably prejudicial with little probative value.
- Authenticity. While an archived tweet may be produced in discovery, its authenticity can be disputed. Defendants may claim the tweet was digitally fabricated or the account hacked. This makes authorship difficult to conclusively establish.
- Expert Testimony. If deleted tweets form a key part of arguments, producing expert witness testimony may be necessary. Digital forensic analysts may need to explain how deleted evidence was recovered and authenticated from archives.
Overall, while deleted tweets can be subpoenaed, litigants on both sides can raise multiple challenges during submission. Court admissibility is still decided on a tweet-by-tweet basis.
What Steps You Can Take To Reduce Liability
Now that you know even your deleted tweets may come back to haunt you in court, you need to tweet smartly. Take the following steps to reduce potential legal risks from your Twitter presence:
Think Before You Tweet. Pause and carefully evaluate tweet content instead of posting in haste. Never tweet confidential data, threats, defamation, or copyright violations that could land you in legal jeopardy. Always ask – would I be comfortable if this tweet was enlarged and displayed in a courtroom?
Enable Account Privacy. Activate privacy settings to make your Twitter account protected or private. This prevents your account data from being accessed by data aggregators. Limit your risk exposure from public tweets that become part of third-party archives.
Clean Up Old Tweets. Routinely review and delete risky, offensive, or false historical tweets from your account. This reduces probable cause for investigators to go on fishing expeditions through your Twitter history.
Use Multiple Accounts. Maintain separate Twitter accounts – personal, professional, and anonymous – based on tweet content. Keep private opinions, corporate statements and random musings compartmentalized to avoid contradictory tweets coming in lawsuits.
Avoid Deleted Tweet Notifications. Services like TweetEraser notify your followers when you delete tweets. This draws unwanted attention and suspicion towards cleanup actions. Deactivate notifications before mass deleting tweets.
Do Not Delete Relevant Tweets Once the Legal Process Starts. Under legal evidentiary rules, deleting tweets after being sued or receiving a subpoena can have consequences. It may constitute unlawful destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice.
Preserving Electronic Stored Information (ESI). Companies have statutory requirements around preserving tweets and other electronic evidence once litigation seems reasonably foreseeable. Failing to institute litigation hold protocols can lead to sanctions.
Overall, think twice before tweeting. But if you do end up posting something regrettable, delete it at the earliest opportunity. Reduce your risks proactively rather than test the limits of using the delete button as a get-out-of-jail-free card!
Laws and Compliance Around Deleted Tweets
Apart from civil lawsuits, deleted tweets can also land you in regulatory trouble or cause compliance headaches for organizations. It’s important to understand what laws mandate data retention and disclosure of deleted social media evidence across jurisdictions.
US Electronic Discovery Rules. Under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governing eDiscovery during lawsuits, organizations must preserve electronically stored information (ESI) such as tweets relevant to litigation. Simply deleting tweets to avoid legal scrutiny goes against evidence preservation obligations.
SEC Social Media Guidance. America’s Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) issued guidance around companies using social media for disclosure. Public firms must retain deleted business-related tweets under record retention policies in case the SEC investigates false disclosures.
UK Data Protection Act. The UK Data Protection Act accounts for personal data in deleted online records. Even if someone deletes their tweet history, social networks continue processing the remains of their data. This requires regulatory compliance under data protection laws.
GDPR Right to Erasure. The EU’s GDPR grants individuals the Right to Erasure allowing them to request organizations to delete all stored personal data. However, this right is limited if records must be preserved as evidence by court order or legal requirement.
Freedom of Information Laws. Many countries have Freedom of Information (FOI) laws allowing citizens access to public records. However, FOI searches retrieving deleted tweets can be restricted based on privacy, national security, or law enforcement exemptions.
As you can see, modern regulations prohibit destroying electronic evidence like tweets leading up to the legal process. However, privacy laws also limit overreach in recovering deleted personal data. Navigating this nuanced cross-section poses compliance challenges organizations must address.
The Future of Deleted Tweets and Legal Discovery
Advancements in machine learning and blockchain are making permanently deleting content increasingly difficult. At the same time, the volume of digital evidence used in lawsuits soaring. These trends will heavily impact future legal discovery and admissibility of deleted tweets.
Archiving via Machine Learning
Powerful AI tools can automatically scrape, analyze, and archive enormous volumes of tweet data that once required extensive human effort. The Internet Archive’s Twitter stream grab crosses 50 billion tweets and counting.
As machine learning streamlines bulk tweet archiving and analytics, recovering clients’ deleted tweet history also becomes easier for lawyers. AI will enhance searchability allowing detailed reconstruction of deleted content.
Blockchain Preservation
Blockchain technology enables decentralized, near-immutable ledgers distributed across networks. Several initiatives are experimenting with archiving content on blockchain for enhanced integrity, transparency, and permanence.
Archiving tweets on blockchain could preserve them almost indelibly across nodes. This distributed preservation mechanism would prevent tweets from being deleted both on social media and blockchain ledgers, creating permanent records.
Analytics Driving Proactive Lawsuits
Litigation analytics tools scrutinize trends across archived tweets to forecast events like cyberbullying before they unfold at scale. Such tools can flag deleted tweets as precursors to boosting lawsuits.
By proactively detecting legal risks, organizations can pursue lawsuits driven by deleted content before impacted stakeholders even complain or report incidents.
The double-edged nature of technology creates complex trade-offs around evidence preservation. But what is certain is the role deleted tweets play in lawsuits will only grow more central going forward.
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