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It really bothers me that traces of someone's existence can be wiped out with a mouse click, be it on twitter, google, facebook, or other sites. I read the tweets while this was going on, I was hoping he would find some other means to cope and raise awareness, and to hear that he actually went through with it. :-( I go to reread and see if there's anything I might have missed and his twitter page is gone as if he never existed.



I agree. But I can't blame him for not wanting to involuntarily dedicate his life to fighting this bullshit. Given the choice between fighting a vastly corrupt and hostile police force, facing merciless prosecutors, being covered by the media, many of whom are hostile, being judged and discussed online, losing the career that you spent your life building, and never being able to leave any of that behind... and not having to deal with any of that? I don't know. I can understand how one in that situation would make this choice, especially in the heat of the moment. Aaron Schwartz made the same call.

It's a tragedy. I desperately hope we get more information.


I'm sure it's more complicated than that. I doubt there was any real career ending situation that was about to occur due to police or anything else.


Aaron Swartz, not Schwartz.


> I can understand how one in that situation would make this choice

I don't. My first reaction when being faced with adversity is to fight it, get revenge in some form, not harm myself hoping that it will shame those that wronged me.



Sans emphasized racist remark, that's pretty sad.



That is mostly a property of Twitter. It disallows crawling by archive.org, and very few others have the capacity to keep up with the massive amounts of data it generates.


The Library of Congress archives tweets.


Apparently there's a facility in Utah that archives all tweets. Unfortunately they have a fairly restricted API.


Internet Archive still seems to have plenty of his tweets up until yesterday. You might find it easier to just add wayback.co/ before any URL to get its Wayback Machine version.


What happened to his linkedin profile as well?




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