Stop Deleting Tweets. Start Owning Them.

by Chris Moyer

Every political consultant in America has given the same piece of advice for the last twenty years. Before you announce, clean up your social media. Delete the awkward stuff. Start fresh. It made sense once. It has quietly stopped working. Nobody updated the memo. 

Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow is the latest person to find out the hard way. CNN's KFile found that she had deleted roughly 6,000 tweets before launching her U.S. Senate campaign. Among them were posts criticizing rural America, praise for California, comparisons of Trump supporters to Nazis, and a declaration that cars are dead. The story landed nationally. Opponents called it a liability. McMorrow went on CNN to respond. 

Her defense was to invoke authenticity. She said she tweeted like a normal person, that the posts were from before she was a politician, and that the real risk is someone so scripted and so focused on running for office that everything they say is manufactured. 

That is actually a defensible argument. It might even be her best available move. 

But here is the contradiction she did not address. She went on national television to defend herself on authenticity grounds for a problem created by an inauthentic act. The deletion did not happen because she was embarrassed by her views. It happened because someone told her to clean up her archive before announcing. She listened. And that decision, made out of political caution and on the advice of smart consultants operating under the old rules, is the thing that created the story. 

The posts were who she was. The deletion was not. 

Do Not Delete. If You Already Did, Say So and Say Why. 

The hygiene strategy made sense in an earlier era, when opposition research was slower and the tools were less powerful. That era is over. The Wayback Machine exists. KFile exists. Researchers have the time and the budget to surface anything that was ever public. When a mass deletion is discovered, the story is no longer about the content of the individual posts. It is about the concealment. And concealment is a harder story to answer than almost any tweet, no matter how embarrassing. 

The moment you delete and someone finds out, every post you ever wrote is reframed as something you were ashamed of and tried to hide. Whether that is true or not is beside the point. That is the narrative, and it is very difficult to escape. 

The better answer, in almost every case, is to have a point of view. If your opinion has changed, say so. People actually respond to that. There is nothing more human than believing something at 28 that you would say differently at 40. Owning that evolution, specifically and honestly, is not a liability. It is a demonstration that you are capable of learning. Voters are more forgiving of changed minds than politicians tend to assume, as long as the change feels genuine and not convenient. 

If you said something wrong, own it. Not with a statement that says mistakes were made. With a direct acknowledgment of what you said, why it was wrong, and what you actually believe. The cleanup language of political apologies, the passive constructions, the non-apology apologies, tends to make things worse because it signals that you are still managing rather than being honest. 

If you deleted posts and now someone has found out, do not defend the deletion. Explain it. There is a version of that explanation that is actually compelling: I listened to political consultants who told me to clean up my history before announcing. That was the standard advice. I followed it. In retrospect, it was the wrong call, and I should have just owned what I said. That answer is harder to say. It is also the one that actually closes the story. 

This Is Not Just a Campaign Problem. 

Every organization that has been on social media for more than a decade has posts somewhere that it would rather not explain. McMorrow is not even alone in this race: CNN reported that fellow Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed quietly erased thousands of old posts including tweets championing the defund the police movement. The instinct to clean the archive is universal. The consequences of getting caught are now universal too. 

The question is not whether to be careful going forward. Of course you should be careful. The question is whether, when something surfaces, you have the credibility and the narrative in place to answer it honestly. If you do not, deletion is not a solution. It is an accelerant. 

The people and organizations that handle these moments best are not the ones with the cleanest archives. They are the ones who have thought about the question before it becomes urgent, who have a genuine point of view on their own history, and who are willing to say out loud: here is what I believed, here is what I believe now, and here is why. 

That is not a communications strategy. That is just honesty. And it turns out honesty is still the most durable strategy there is.