1. Don't want their lives 'ruined' because of socially unacceptable tweets. 2. Don't want their citizens to know that they are actively committing genocide. 3.

1. Don't want their lives 'ruined' because of socially unacceptable tweets. 2. Don't want their citizens to know that they are actively committing genocide. 3. Countless other equally legitimate reasons for removing things from the public record. 4. I'm embarrassed. 5. I could loose money. 6. My reputation will be tarnished. 7. I don't want anyone to know that I a into 'x y and z.' 8. I was young and foolish. Some actually legitimate reasons 1. Outed themselves as a minority which is now being persecuted. (too late, the state already has the evidence) 2. Need to remove a post that is actively agitating/acting as a focus point for some group that rises to the level of physical threats. People, the internet is public. If you put up something on port 80 or 443, you have just published a book. You can't unpublish a book. I'm sorry if the affordances are shitty and the social media platforms intentionally mislead you into thinking that publishing is 'sharing,' but if you published it, you have to own it. You cannot unspeak, and if you do you or if a systems allows you to, then that is a fundamental violation of the social contract. If you fucked up, and want to appologise, or provide additional context, then by all means do so. In cases where a tweet, post, etc. incites a brigade, there need to be ways to temporarily hide content, but if it is deleted forever, then there is a tempest in a teapot without any teapot for reference. Not that it will ever happen, but platforms like twitter should be held accountable for facilitating viral hatred and brigading, it would incentivize them to implement algorithms to damp the spread and to force additional context onto users before they are allowed to view a hot and bothered tweet (or similar). You must correctly answer these 10 questions about the context from which the author was speaking before you are allowed to retweet or even view this message. That might be a good compromise for 'surge' internet outrage.