Who Owns Your Retweet?

When you retweet something, do you expect someone else to be able to delete it?

Previously, if you retweeted something, your retweet was your own. Only you had the ability to delete it.

But with Twitter’s new retweet feature, your retweet is tied to the original author’s tweet. And if the original author deletes the tweet, your retweet is deleted from your timeline.

I’m not sure what the proper way to handle this is.

On the one hand, if the original author shared something they wished to retract, it would be nice to honor that.

On the other hand, the tweet didn’t happen in a vacuum. More importantly, the act of retweeting should be tied to the timeline of the person who retweeted it. Someone else shouldn’t be able to scrub that history.

What do you think?