Anything in a Database Can Be Deleted

A birdwatch note has disappeared from one of Elon Musks tweets, where he was moaning about losing advertising money. I don’t know if Musk ordered to have the note removed or if this resulted from a community review — and I don’t want to speculate.

According to official statements, Birdwatch notes cannot be edited or deleted by Twitter staff. Obviously, this is only partially true.

This blog is built with Jekyll, and a Git repository is its database. I can delete a post quickly, but it will still be available in the commit history. With a little more effort, using git rebase, I can purge the post entirely from history as if it never existed.

There might not be a user interface for Birdwatch notes that Twitter staff can use to remove and delete notes quickly. But the note lives in a database alongside tweets, user information, and likes. In that database, you can amend entities and their relationships. If you have direct access to the database and if you know how to google the SQL command you need, you don’t need a graphical user interface to make changes.

Usually, only a few people in an organisation have this kind of access. But if you own the place, you can find that person, and from there, it’s as simple as DELETE FROM birdwatch_notes WHERE tweet_id = '1588538640401018880';

Anything in a database can be deleted. And here lies a potential problem with Musk’s ownership of Twitter. Nothing can stop him from ordering content removal if pressed by the authoritarian regime of a country where he wants to sell Teslas.