What to do before Twitter implodes?
MEDIA BYTES
By Rev. Marty Levesque
As many of you know Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Space X, has purchased Twitter.
Since that purchase has been finalized Twitter has fired more than half of its staff with hundreds more quitting when they refused to work more than the contracted 40 hours a week.
Twitter is no longer enforcing moderation policies surrounding Covid-19 misinformation, pornography links are resurfacing and banned racist words are once again being permitted on the platform. Individuals who were banned from the platform for racist, misogynistic and hate-filled rants have been reinstated.
Because of this, advertisers are fleeing the platform and revenue streams are drying up for Twitter.
What will happen to Twitter, I have no idea. But it is a good idea to protect your data and network in case Twitter does eventually implode, as it seems likely to do. After all, each of us has invested much time, talent and treasure in our digital outreach. It would be a shame to lose all this data that can be used to help build the kingdom of God.
The first step is to create an archive of your church's data that has been collected by Twitter. I would suggest each individual users do the same. Simply go to your settings and under the "Your Account" sub-menu, click on the “download an archive of your data” tab. It may take anywhere from 24 hours to 72 hours for Twitter to prepare your download.
Once downloaded, I would store the data on Google Drive, which each church has been assigned cloud storage that is safe, and encrypted with redundant backups.
The chaos at Twitter is a good reminder to always protect your data that we have provided to these online services. We can’t assume our data will be there tomorrow, as we can’t assume Twitter will be there tomorrow.
Rev. Marty Levesque is the diocesan social media officer and rector of All Saints’ in Waterloo. martylevesque@diohuron.org