The great promise of Twitter is that it brings us closer to the people we’re interested in. What are my friends doing? Where is my local MP today? How many journalists have published lists of facts about cats so far today?
But there is no greater insight into who people are than when they make a mistake and how they try to remedy or cover up said mistake. Politicians have grown adept at parroting the talking points of the day, so it’s only when they mess up a private message and accidentally show us their dicks that we really know what they’re made of. So, in the interest of seeing everyone’s dick, the Department of Australia introduces the Bureau of Regret, a semi-regular round-up of the week in deleted tweets.
On Sunday, News Corp columnist Miranda Devine retweeted, then very quickly deleted this Tweet by @alan_john_moran:
Mamamia founder and publisher Mia Freedman posted a whole raft of tweets during this week’s episode of 60 Minutes, then deleted them all an hour later:
Politician and Reverend Fred Nile, a man as committed to the correct use of grammatical tense as he is to the perpetuation of dangerously archaic world views, was faced with a theological dilemma: how does one describe man’s association with God after he has shuffled off this mortal coil? In composing a tweet about a Christian sent to the gallows by murderous jihadis, Nile took the default position: when the stinking bag of guts and teeth that we call bodies expire, we get a high-five from the King of Kings.
A little over a minute later, he deleted and reposted that tweet with a change in tense from “is” to “was”. We are always being hugged by Jesus. Whether you’re shopping, playing Jenga or being hanged by barbarians, Jesus’ arms are wrapped around you, tucking it in nice and tight.
But then it turned out that the story was a hoax, so 20 minutes later that tweet got deleted too.
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