Twitter compliance pitfall, do you know where your DM’s are?

Have you ever logged into Twitter and noticed that your Direct Message count was shrinking? You probably thought it was a case of the mysteriously deleted DM. Doing a quick Google search on the issue would present you with the answer. It actually isn’t a bug, a hacked account or a mystery at all. Twitter is behaving exactly as it was designed.

Here is the explanation from Twitter on the topic:

“Direct messages behave more like tweets than emails: any action the sender of a DM takes on a direct message will affect the recipient of that DM.  As the recipient of the Direct Message, you have the ability to delete it; the messages you delete also disappear from the sender’s sent tab. Conversely, deleting direct messages you have sent will also delete the message from the recipient’s inbox forever.

The number next to your Direct Messages tab reflects the number of direct messages in your inbox. If this number has changed recently and you have not deleted any of your messages, remember: the sender of the direct message has the ability to delete messages from your inbox, these messages are not mysteriously disappearing or getting lost.”

Repeat after me. A DM is not the same as an email. A DM is not the same as an email. A DM is not the same as an email.

Now that we all understand how DMs work and the fact that the creator can delete them or the recipient (remember, it will be deleted on both accounts) lets dive into the compliance issues for any regulated industry such as FINRA/SEC firms, Educators, Government agencies or entities, etc.

The most obvious area this impacts from a compliance standpoint is archival and discovery. If you are in a regulated space and are not currently using an archiving solution then you are at serious risk of being out of compliance. You may be doing the right thing by not deleting any sent DMs but the second a recipient deletes a received DM it will be removed from your account as well.

For a lot of Twitter users they like to keep their inboxes clean just as they do with email. And there are a countless number of services (such as DM Whacker, SocialOomph, Twitter DM Deleter) that make it easy to quickly delete all DMs, whether received or sent. Translation, you need to act now.

If you are a medium to large firm it is critical that you scan and archive this information in real-time. If you don’t you risk someone sending a DM and then removing it. The result would be a lack of compliance with FINRA/SEC guidelines, Freedom of Information ACT guidelines, possibly corporate guidelines and the list goes on.

For additional information on compliance issues related to social networks please download our recently published guide.