It’s late. You had a bit too much to drink or maybe you’re just irritable because of fatigue, but you decide to log into Facebook and respond to your ex’s post about her new relationship or you really let your boss have it for making you stay late. You let your true colors show — and they are not beautiful.
You wake up in the morning and your phone is blowing up from notifications about your post. You promptly delete your post, pretend it didn’t happen and continue on with your day.
That post was deleted and never happened … right?
Wrong. Even if you delete a Tweet or remove a Facebook post, it was still read and has been archived.
When a user posts on another’s wall, the receiving user gets an email with the text of that post. This is proof or evidence. If you tweeted an ill-tempered tweet — or any tweet actually — it has been archived by the Library of Congress. If someone follows you to his or her phone, your angry tweet is saved as a SMS text. 
Suppose what you said online could be considered threatening; if someone was truly offended and wanted to report you, saving the evidence is as easy as a quick keyboard command to screenshot your post.
I know this latter archive technique because I used it once. Someone I knew threw water balloons at my car and put a Frosty on my windshield. I was unhappy, so I browsed Facebook and found the culprit because they didn’t think before they posted. I “screenshotted” what she said before she deleted it and made her clean up my car or else I would get police involved.
Suppose an organization begins to delete negative posts on their page, there will be some backlash. (Unnecessarily vulgar and explicit posts are fair game for deleting, especially if stated in the About section of the page.) These posters will ban together, spam the page and continue to do so until the organization addresses the problem and fixes it. People don’t like it when you ignore their criticisms, let alone delete them.
Deleting posts show weakness either way. If you said something dumb, take responsibility for it. If someone posts a negative critique on your page, respond to it in a mature way.
#1 by Jon Stinchcomb on September 7, 2012 - 11:55 am
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Celebrities and other prominent figures seem to make this mistake a lot. It would seem that social media etiquette is often lost on some of them.
An area I follow very closely is sports. I mentioned in class a while back, a Cleveland Browns beat writer lost his job of 30 years for an inadvertent tweet, and that didn’t include any obscenities at all. He deleted the tweet fairly promptly, but it was already out there, “screepcapped”/archived, and in the public consciousnesses. Luckily for this particular beat writer, he was picked up by another media outlet a few months later and has since repaired his public image.
Even just this past weekend, Michigan State football players stirred up controversy just for tweeting disparaging comments about the way Michigan was playing against Alabama. They deleted the tweets, but that didn’t really help their case.
Those two situations are only a few of the many. This really seems to happen way too often.
#2 by sarrutz on September 7, 2012 - 10:21 pm
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It’s so true that deleting tweets (or facebook posts) doesn’t mean that people don’t see them, or, more importantly, that they’ll come back and bite the poster in the butt eventually. We see this with celebrities all the time. Chris Brown, after he won a Grammy, posted on his twitter some rather choice words that angered a lot of his fans and especially his non-fans. He later deleted these tweets, but that doesn’t mean that hundreds of people didn’t screenshot them and post them all over the internet. People are so quick with screenshots nowadays—on most computers, it’s literally just a tap of a button. Being cognizant and really thinking about what you say before you say it can save you a lot of grief in the future.
#3 by gemma on September 11, 2012 - 4:02 pm
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I agree with you, once you put something out there on social media, it never goes away. Even if you delete it, the post never really dissapears. People do this all the time and it does not reflect nicely on their reputation. This is why it is so important to be careful about what we post. as the saying goes, ‘think before you speak’, ‘think before you post’. Maybe even a couple times. As we all know probably too well, once something is on the internet, it never goes away.
#4 by graveyard on January 20, 2023 - 7:04 am
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Нi there! Do you know if they make any plugins to safeguard against hackers?
I’m kinda ρaranoid about losing everything I’ve ѡοrked hаrd on. Any suggestions?