How tech platforms turned fleeting thoughts into permanent public records — and what that means for a generation that grew up online.
It started, as most Nigerian Twitter storms do, with good intentions and a viral moment. Last week, Afrobeats singer Simisola “Simi” Kosoko took to X to demand justice for victims of sexual assault, calling for rapists to be “castrated and burnt alive.” Her outrage was immediate, fierce, and, to many of her fans, entirely in character. Then the internet did what the internet does best: it dug.
Within hours, screenshots of tweets from 2012 and 2013 jokes about children at her mother’s daycare, written when, according to the statement she later put out, she was a 23-year-old hustling her first demos, were flying across timelines, stripped of context and weaponized with precision. By the time Simi released a formal statement on February 22 to address what she called the “false narratives” being built around her words, her team had already begun quietly deleting the resurfaced posts. The speed of that deletion was not accidental. It was, whether they knew it or not, the first move in a digital crisis playbook.
The Illusion of Ephemerality
Back in 2010. Twitter had just crossed the 100-million-user threshold, and its defining cultural texture was disposability. Tweets were conversational flotsam — quick, witty, throwaway. The interface itself encouraged this: there was no edit button, no archiving feature surfaced to ordinary users, no algorithm curating your 2011 opinions for a 2024 audience. You scrolled, you posted, the river moved on. The early adopters who shaped Twitter’s culture were journalists, comedians, and tech insiders who treated the platform like a loud dinner party. Nobody imagined it was being transcribed.
That assumption was catastrophically wrong, but it took years for the implications to land. The Library of Congress began archiving public tweets in 2010, a fact announced with the kind of institutional fanfare that attracted brief curiosity before being forgotten. The Wayback Machine was quietly cataloguing web pages. Third-party archiving services indexed public posts with algorithmic indifference. And users themselves — the most effective archivists of all — learned to screenshot everything, understanding intuitively that deletion proves nothing.
By 2015, the culture of digital ephemerality was already fraying. Gamergate had demonstrated that coordinated screenshot campaigns could destroy reputations with surgical precision. The first major “old tweet” controversy cycles had begun to appear, exposing public figures for posts they had long since forgotten. The dinner party metaphor was dead. Twitter, or X as it is now called, turned out to be a court of record.
From Archive to Arsenal
The shift that followed was less technological than psychological. The tools for excavating old posts had existed for years; what changed was the social appetite for using them. Analysts have argued that what transformed X, which rebranded from Twitter in 2023 when Elon Musk bought it, into a more combative, less moderated space was Musk subsequently platforming divisive right-wing figures, particularly the then-presidential candidate, now US President Donald Trump. It became an environment where the archive wasn’t just a passive repository but an active weapon.
What is categorically new is the scale of exposure and the demographics most affected. Previous generations did embarrassing things in their youth, too, said ignorant things, held views they later abandoned, made jokes that did not age well, and even vociferously criticized authority. The difference is that those moments were witnessed by tens, perhaps hundreds, of people. They faded. Social media has ensured that the equivalent moments for today’s young people are potentially witnessed by millions, indexed by machines, and permanently retrievable.
Judging Yesterday’s Words by Today’s Standards
Simi is by no means the first public figure to be a victim of this genre of public humiliation. Last year, Ezra Olubi, co-founder of Paystack, lost his job as CTO after his old tweets were dug up. Way before Ezra, Bosun Tijani, Nigeria’s Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, had to delete posts criticizing the APC government after party members online weaponized those posts against him. This is where the permanence economy raises its hardest question: should old posts be judged by current cultural standards?
Does this mean I am arguing against demanding accountability for either Ezra or Simi or any other public figure that could be caught in the future? Far from it. If whatever was tweeted caused harm to an individual or a group, or they were an accessory to a crime, they should be subject to the law.
But the argument for contextual judgment is equally serious. Regardless of your personal opinion about Ezra or Simi, it is important to know that cultural norms shift, often rapidly. Terminology that was in mainstream circulation a decade ago can now be understood as harmful in ways that were not widely recognized at the time. If we are to have an honest conversation, devoid of agenda, or just the desire use someone as a lightning rod for our anger because we happen not to agree with their views, then we need to have an honest conversation about the question of culpability versus the question of awareness.
What gets lost in most of these controversies is the absence of nuance that the format itself enforces. A screenshot cannot contain growth. It cannot show the apology that came later, the education that followed, the person who changed. The permanence economy deals in frozen moments, and frozen moments, by definition, cannot account for time. Interestingly enough, the lesson we have learnt from both Ezra and Simi is that when the mob with its torches and pitchforks has dispersed, we finally have cooler heads and voices of reason arguing that it was all a storm in a teacup. There are no winners; the only losers are the victims of mob anger who have to pick up the pieces that are left behind.
Generation Without a Right to Be Forgotten
The European Union’s “Right to be Forgotten”, the legal principle allowing individuals to request the removal of outdated personal data from search results, may be one of the most significant digital rights frameworks of the 21st century. Vociferous arguments about accountability notwithstanding, it acknowledges something that social media platforms have systematically denied: that people change, that information can become misleading with age alone, and that the persistence of data is not the same as its relevance.
One thing that is noteworthy in both Ezra’s and Simi’s cases is the motivation for digging those posts out. A vengeful ex dug out Ezra’s posts; Simi’s were by someone who disagreed with her feminism. In both cases, the motivation was vindictive against the person, not a desire to bring justice to their victims, real or imagined. The prospect of a reality where a random person has the power to weaponize the past against a public figure, due to differences in opinion, without caring for nuance or context, should give us pause, regardless of our opinions on the habits of individual public figures or public figures as a group. As we have seen in the cases of Bosun Tijani and Seun Onigbinde, it might not even be “degenerate posts”; it could be something as normal as criticism of certain actions of political figures, or disagreement over social issues.
In my piece on Femi Falana (SAN) and his case against Meta, I argued that algorithms are never neutral, and this case is one more example of the need for safeguards for sensitive data, faster response mechanisms for harmful content, and clearer accountability pathways.
That is not simply a privacy issue. It is a developmental one. And it raises a question that platforms, policymakers, and the culture at large have not come close to answering: what do we owe the person someone used to be, and what do we owe the person they are trying to become?
The internet never forgets. The question is whether there are times when we should simply make it do so.
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