"This Tweet Has Been Deleted" Rule

About

The "This Tweet Has Been Deleted" Rule is an internet rule and axiom that states seeing the message "This tweet has been deleted" at the bottom of a screenshotted tweet (which appears when a Twitter user deletes their post) makes the preceding tweet exponentially funnier. After the rule was posited by a Twitter user in March 2023, users on the app began sharing examples of "this tweet has been deleted" images and found that in most cases, the axiom was true.

Origin

On March 7th, 2023, Twitter user @nizedatpussy^[1] posted, "'This tweet has been deleted' makes shit 10x more funny," gaining over 6,300 retweets, 3,300 quote-tweets and 45,000 likes in one week (shown below).

Spread

In response to the tweet, several Twitter users began posting examples of tweets that had been deleted, illustrating how the "deleted" message made the tweet funnier. For example, on March 8th, 2023, Twitter user @RichHabitz_^[2] posted an example that gained over 750 retweets and 10,000 likes in five days (shown below, left). That same day, user @GodElJay^[3] posted an example that gained over 2,900 retweets and 22,000 likes in a similar timeframe (shown below, right).

In the week following the original post, several posts tied to current events seemed to prove the axiom true to many users as additional examples continued to spread on the platform. For example, on March 12th, Twitter user @notcamdennis^[4] posted an example of a deleted tweet by Occupy Democrats praising Jeffrey Epstein (shown below, left). On March 13th, Twitter user @ArtBrovera^[5] posted a deleted tweet from Zak Kukoff discussing the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse, gaining over 20 retweets and 60 likes in two hours (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References