Why do you delete your tweets?

Why’d You Push That Button is back for season 3, and our first episode is a relatively serious one. Vox’s Kaitlyn Tiffany and I catch up on our summers and then dive into everyone’s favorite social media platform: Twitter. We need to discuss tweets. Are they worth deleting, or should we preserve our limited-character history? Who needs to worry about their tweets? What happens if a potential employer searches your Twitter? What will they find?

Kaitlyn and Ashley reflect on their tweet history, and we take it to other users and experts. First, they talk to Max Read, an editor at New York Magazine, and then they chat with Brianna Wu, a woman who ran for Congress this year and was previously a target of Gamergate. Then they talk to Alison Green of the Ask A Manager website / book / podcast universe. (She is Ask A Manager!) And they wrap the show chatting with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, which attempts to archive the web. It’s true: you could think you deleted a tweet only to discover someone else on the internet has already saved it for you. A truly spooky possibility in the spirit of Halloween.

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