We’ve all seen the recent news about Twitter bringing back the ability to delete direct messages (DMs). But what many of us don’t know is that permanently deleting DMs from your account still isn’t possible. Instead, the service just deletes them from your view, leaving the contents of the message still stored on the Twitter servers.
In the current environment of digital privacy concerns and data theft, the inability to fully erase our data from social media platforms can be a huge concern.
Many users don’t realize that when they delete a DM, their message isn’t really gone. In fact, it’s still visible to the other person, as well as to Twitter itself. Deleting a DM simply hides the message from your own view, and leaves it untouched on the other side.
The only way to be sure that a message is truly gone is to delete the entire conversation between you and the other person. Unfortunately, this requires you to click the “delete conversation” option, which is relatively hard to find.
It’s generally easier to delete all of the messages from the conversation and hide the conversation from your view, but this may not be a viable option for those who want to permanently erase their data from Twitter’s servers.
Overall, Twitter’s limited ability to delete DMs and ensure that the data is wiped away for good is a huge concern for many users. Just because you can no longer see a conversation doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t have the content stored somewhere. Twitter should make steps to allow their users to permanently erase their content and messages if they choose to do so.
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