A growing number of Twitter users decided to tidy up their tweets in 2020. According to a recent study, deleted tweets were up by nearly 14% last year on the social network -- a significant increase, seen particularly in June, coinciding with the "Black Lives Matter" protests. Users in the US lead the way for the most tweets deleted.
Internet users seem to be paying greater attention to what they write on social media. According to data from the Tweet Deleter tool, deleted tweets in 2020 were up by 13.9% compared to 2019. This could suggest that web users are placing greater importance on the messages they post on social networks. In total, 205,309,876 tweets and 21,239,112 "Likes" were deleted in 2020.
Keeping online reputations in check
According to data from the Tweet Deleter application, users in the US were the most active tweet deleters in 2020, with a total 27.37 million messages deleted, followed by Japan (11.23 million) and the UK (4.01 million). Note that the top three countries by Twitter user count are the US, with 68.7 million, Japan (51.9 million) and India (18.9 million).
Based on data from Tweet Deleter users, the platform found that people often chose to delete messages containing profanities (36.21%). When users were asked why they were looking to remove their past tweets, "cleaning up my feed for potential employers" was the most common response, followed by "getting rid of embarrassing tweets," reports Social Media Today.
Think before you tweet
With last year's various political and social movements, web users appear to be taking a more cautious approach to what they post, while re-thinking old tweets in a bid to maintain their online image and removing anything potentially damaging. This could explain some of this tweet deleting activity.
Recently, Twitter rolled out a prompt system alerting users who are about to post harmful or offensive replies on the platform. When contacted by ETX Studio, Twitter explained that the function aims to encourage people to rethink a potentially offensive reply that they're about to tweet, in the heat of the moment, before they send it. As part of continual improvements, the social network hopes that the trial will help reduce the number of offensive tweets on the platform.
