By Adam Pagnucco.
Last month, I wrote that Council Member Kristin Mink had deleted thousands of her tweets. Those deletions have ceased, and according to social media tracking site Social Blade, more than 10,000 of her tweets are now gone.
My prior post contained a screenshot of her account from May 7, 2022 showing that it had roughly 13,800 tweets on that date. By June 26, that total had risen to 14,926 tweets according to Social Blade. Around that time, the number of tweets began to fall steadily. The chart below shows how that total changed from June 26 through August 13.
This chart shows the daily pace of deletions, which exceeded 400 on every day between June 28 and July 14.
By August 3, the deletions had stopped. On that date, Mink’s account had 3,962 tweets. That’s down 10,964 tweets, or 73%, from June 26.
As of this writing (August 13), Mink’s account has 3,970 tweets.
Social Blade shows the toll of deleted tweets. In June, 2,026 were deleted. In July, 8,866 were deleted.
Social Blade does not track every Twitter account but it tracks a lot of them. Check out the stats on Twitter accounts belonging to Marc Elrich, Evan Glass, Will Jawando, Gabe Albornoz, Andrew Friedson, Wes Moore, Aruna Miller, Brooke Lierman, Anthony Brown, Bill Ferguson, Adrienne Jones, Chris Van Hollen (campaign and personal accounts), Ben Cardin (office and personal accounts), Jamie Raskin (office and personal accounts), David Trone (office and personal accounts), Angela Alsobrooks and Joe Biden. You won’t find any evidence of mass deletions of thousands of tweets on these accounts.
Let’s consider the enormity of this project. Every single one of us has said something we regret, including on social media. But how many of us have said more than 10,000 things on social media that we regret and must delete? For the sake of comparison, I have written more than 4,000 columns about Montgomery County and Maryland since 2006. There are more than a few clunkers in there (as my readers will remind me!) but Mink has deleted more than twice the content that I have ever written. When you’re twice as bad as Pagnucco that’s really saying something!
Now consider the logistics. How long does it take to delete 400 tweets in a single day? Let’s assume it takes one minute on average to find a bad one and get rid of it. That’s 60 in an hour or about six and a half hours total. For whoever is doing it, whether it’s Mink or someone else, that’s almost a full workday – for more than two weeks straight!
On Friday morning, I asked Mink’s office for comment on these tweet deletions. As of this writing, I have heard nothing back.