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White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci says he’ll delete tweets the internet already recorded

Empty transparency.

By Rani Molla
White House Communications Team Reshuffled, With Sean Spicer Resignation And Anthony Scaramucci Appointed Director Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Rani Molla is a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Just one day into his job as White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci announced on Twitter that he’d be deleting past tweets. Not only is this a highly counterintuitive move for the person charged with communicating between the Trump administration and the press — not to mention a weird understanding of the term “full transparency” — it’s also patently ineffective.

His tweets have already been repeated, recorded, shared and downloaded all over the internet. So even if Scaramucci deletes them, they still exist.

The internet has already had a lot of fun with Scaramucci’s old tweets, including one where he misattributed a quote to Mark Twain. It inspired a deluge of tweets with purposefully incorrect sourcing. He’s also written plenty of tweets that don’t square with his new boss.

Fortunately, his tweets aren’t going anywhere.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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