  Over 500 million tweets are posted in Twitter each day, out of which about
11% tweets are deleted by the users posting them. This phenomenon of widespread
deletion of tweets leads to a number of questions: what kind of content posted
by users makes them want to delete them later? %Are all users equally active in
deleting their tweets or Are users of certain predispositions more likely to
post regrettable tweets, deleting them later? In this paper we provide a
detailed characterization of tweets posted and then later deleted by their
authors. We collected tweets from over 200 thousand Twitter users during a
period of four weeks. Our characterization shows significant personality
differences between users who delete their tweets and those who do not. We find
that users who delete their tweets are more likely to be extroverted and
neurotic while being less conscientious. Also, we find that deleted tweets
while containing less information and being less conversational, contain
significant indications of regrettable content. Since users of online
communication do not have instant social cues (like listener's body language)
to gauge the impact of their words, they are often delayed in employing repair
strategies. Finally, we build a classifier which takes textual, contextual, as
well as user features to predict if a tweet will be deleted or not. The
classifier achieves a F1-score of 0.78 and the precision increases when we
consider response features of the tweets.
