I should mention one other drawback to protecting your tweets. Some third-party Twitter services do not work if your tweets are protected. I find this to be mildly annoying, but not a large problem. I can get by quite well without those services. The third-party Twitter service I find most useful, , works fine for Twitter accounts that are protected.

Twitter itself provides very little guidance or advice on whether you should protect your tweets. Perhaps Twitter might link to this blog post in their settings page to help Twitter newcomers with this decision.

The author is an educator and community-builder in the Washington DC-area. He can be reached at philshapiroblogger@gmail.com and on Twitter at

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