Comment by bunderbunder

I haven't read it in 10 years, but this used to be pretty explicitly spelled out in Twitter's privacy policy, in plain language, in a way that I really appreciated. (Not that anyone ever reads the privacy policy.)

But it really does make sense. Nothing you publicly tweet can ever be private, nor is there any real way you can reliably take it back. Because as soon as the tweet's been transferred to someone else's device, they now have every bit as much control over that content as they do over any other content that makes it onto their device.

I'm a pretty pro-privacy person, to the point where I generally avoid social media sites. But this was also my policy back when I administered an oldschool Web forum: once it's posted, it's out of your control. Period. That's really the only policy for a public forum that makes any sense at all. If that's scary to you then maybe the things you're posting should be, y'know, kept private instead of being broadcast to the entire world.

tl;dr: group chats are actually pretty cool.