"Someone could screenshot your past tweets or embed them in a blog post. Just so you’re aware."

That's the sentence from "There’s no good reason to keep old tweets online. Here’s how to delete them" that I need to reverse engineer. Although the author of this WaPo piece, Abby Ohlheiser, is trying to talk people into fearing and destroying their Twitter archive, I care about my blog archive, and I don't want Twitter archive deleters to erode my archive and put blank spots where I've embedded tweets. Bloggers like me who love the archive should use screenshots. The links won't work in a screenshot of a tweet, but you can link to the tweet, and people can go to the tweet (if it's still up) and click on the links. Screenshots load a lot faster too.

An odd thing about Ohlheiser's article is that she begins by scaring readers about some people who suffered serious consequences because their archives had some old tweets that were — or seemed —anti-gay, pro-rape, pedophiliac, or racist. How many WaPo readers are worried about old tweets like that?

But by 2018, we should know that a tweet is simply too easy to take out of context — and there’s no reason to keep a full accounting of everything you’ve ever tweeted. So here’s a guide to getting rid of it.

Let me translate that for you: Our culture has become so insane that even you bland innocuous people ought to cower, because you can never be sure what might be used against you and when it is, you will be screwed. Maybe you once loved the freedom of expression, but it's 2018, and it's time for sprawling, pervasive anxiety. You need to be paranoid about the enemy that is your own old witty remarks and even your laughter (i.e., retweets) in response to somebody else's jokes. Because by 2018, nobody knows what a joke is anymore. It's the Era of That's Not Funny.

Ohlheiser says, "I deleted almost my entire Twitter archive about a year ago... I hesitated for months, because I was too attached to my years-old food observations and tweets about the local art scene in the small city I lived in after college." That could be a good setup for one of those New Yorker "Shouts and Murmurs" humor pieces. You once posed as empathic and beneficent attending the opening of an exhibition of photographs by and of transgender people. Today, that pose reads as condescending. Disrespectful. There's that old "food observation" about an ethnic restaurant that, by 2018 standards, smacks of racism. Years ago, you ate a taco. Today, you seem to have culturally appropriated it.