That’s not an unreasonable position, but the challenge for Twitter is that the interest in deleted tweets isn’t going away, especially with 2016 U.S. presidential election nearing.
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Twitter has blocked access to more than 30 accounts that tracked and archived the deleted tweets of politicians and diplomats around the world.
Although the company always allowed all users – including politicians – to delete their tweets, it also allowed the Dutch organization Open Source Foundation to track erased tweets via an application programming interface.
Politwoops’ fans aren’t happy, seeing a little bit of revisionist history at play. It actively “verifies” people of public importance, like journalists and politicians, to help authenticate their statements for broad dissemination. Supporting such a giant user-base, Twitter is the second largest social network in the world and celebrities, corporate executives, and politicians use it to tweet about various things and to address the public.
Twitter reportedly told OSF the decision was made after “thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors”, adding that politicians’ tweets should be treated no differently than those of the general public.
There are still ways for the Open State Foundation or anyone to continue recording deleted tweets.
The British version of Politwoops is amongst the sites affected. There is enormous value in tracking deleted public tweets, which offered an intimate perspective on politicians and how they communicate with their constituents. “This is not about typos but it is a unique insight on how messages from elected politicians can change without notice”.
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Arjan El Fassed, the director of the Open State Foundation, which supports Politwoops and Diplotwoops, not surprisingly took issue with Twitter’s decision. Having concern for user privacy as well as freedom of expression, Twitter has disabled Politwoops from saving tweets that were deleted by their owners. Why would Twitter need to verify the identity of only some individuals if their words were not more important than others by some measure? “Our shared conversations on “public” platforms are increasingly taking place in privately owned and managed walled gardens, which means that the politics that occur in such conversations are subject to private rules”, Gates said in a statement e-mailed to the Star.
