[Thread]1/ It was brought to my attention that Conservative MPs were deleting retweets by @darrengrimes_ today. According to @deletedbyMPs - MPs appeared to be deleting tweets by DG en masse. In fact, if you look at deleted tweets mentioning Grimes, they spike today! HOWEVER...

2/ After looking at the tweets in question, it appears the suspicious activity is because @darrengrimes_ is deleting those tweets, thus causing @deletedbyMPs to believe that MPs have 'deleted' the tweets too (after all deletedbyMPs tracks MP activity, not that of DG). So the

3/ question is not "Why are MPs deleting tweets by Darren Grimes?', but rather 'Why is Darren Grimes deleting all those tweets?'. Next tweet I will try to figure out how many were deleted, and what they say exactly... Stay tuned...

4/ Yikes, there was a real purge here. I count 200+ rows. Some of the tweets will be duplicates (i.e. multiple MPs would have retweeted the same tweet), but even a cursory glance shows that there are a lot of unique tweets here being deleted.

5/ There's more....

6/ Just in case there are any doubting Thomases, or 'Thomi', you can see the tweets have been deleted. If you search for one of them in google, in this case, some tripe about the 'political class' 'thwarting' 'the will of the working people', you can see it was deleted...

7/ Now it's not clear how @deletedbyMPs how works, but if it's in near realtime, it would suggest these tweets were deleted en masse in a short space of time and recently, which does seem bizarre. I guess we shall see over the coming days if anything is afoot. There are

8/ likely more deleted tweets that haven't registered (remember wee are only looking at tweets that were retweeted at one point by an MP). Anyway, the lesson here is that the internet never forgets, so be careful what you say!

9/ Ok wow, so on June 11th, @darrengrime_ had around 16,400 tweets on his TL, now he has 733, so he's deleted around 15,650 tweets. That's almost all of them. Why? is it some attempt to improve his algorithm, an attempt to purge a regretful past? A glitch?

10/ The volume of this tweeting would suggest some software is being deployed, not sure which, or how it was calibrated. Unless of course some poor intern was tasked with it

11/ There are services to delete your tweets, this one sent to me by @StBridgetAthena [thanks] has a premium service when you can theoretically delete your whole timeline, by age of tweet, keywords etc. https://tweetdelete.net/delete_tweets/ 

12/ ok so I scrolled all the way down Darren's timeline (tweets and replies and tweets) and the earliest tweet he has is from May 18 2020. IRumble comes up with the same. So he deleted over four year's worth of tweets.