Twitter is building a feature to automatically archive tweets

In 2018, Disney fired Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn over tweets he wrote between 2008 and 2012. While the company later rehired Gunn, he’s just one of many people for whom an old social media post came back to haunt him. In recent years, some Twitter users have turned to tools like TweetDelete.net to avoid something similar happening to them. Twitter could soon also offer its own solution to the problem.

Sharing part of its product roadmap with Bloomberg, the company said it plans to eventually test a feature that would allow people to automatically archive their tweets after a predetermined amount of time. The tool is currently in the concept phase and doesn’t have a release date, but Twitter said it’s considering a number of time options, including 30, 60 and 90 days.

The decision to give people the ability to archive their tweets is part of a broader “social privacy” push Twitter told Bloomberg is about giving people more control over their identity on the platform. To that end, the company plans to test a feature this month that will allow people to remove followers. By the end of the year, it will also trial a tool that gives individuals the option to remove themselves from public conversations people mention them in.

Twitter told Bloomberg many of the above tools come in response to creative workarounds its users have found to make up for missing features. For instance, people have found you can remove someone as a follower by blocking and unblocking them. Building on a concept it shared back in July (seen above), the company also plans to prompt people to review whether their accounts are public or private.

It will be interesting to see if Twitter decides to only give some users the option to archive their tweets. After all, the platform acts as a kind of public record, giving people a way to keep politicians accountable for things they said in the past.