I often advocate for understanding what we are paying for. On another site that I’m involved with, Middle School Matters, I made the mistake of not following up on that. See, a long time ago, I set up Paper.li to create a newsletter. I entered some keywords and sites that we (I share the podcast with the wonderful and talented Mr. Shawn McGirr) generally support. Paper.li would create a “newsletter” and tweet the link out.
This worked pretty well for a long time. I stopped paying tons of attention to it, OK, I paid very little attention to it. Then, someone notified me that the Middle School Matters (MSMatters) twitter account was filled with hashtags that do not support my beliefs at all.
I was horrified. I quickly closed the account. However, I didn’t want to lose everything. Since I know that you have 30 days to resurrect an account, closing seemed the best thing to do.
Next, I looked at my options to delete tweets. Fortunately, I found Cardigan. Cardigan is an open source project (yea!) that allows you to delete tweets. I was able to look for the hashtags that I found offensive and delete those tweets. Cardigan is very clear about what is happening. After looking for specific hashtags, Cardigan clearly identified the tweets. Then, I could delete those tweets. I was informed that it may take some time.
So, now the twitter account is once again available. Paper.li is now dead to me. Lesson learned. Sometimes doing things the easy way is anything but.
Leave a Reply