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Twitter To Revive Politwoops, Archive of Politicians' Deleted Tweets (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Twitter shut down Politwoops, a network of deleted tweets from politicians, this summer with the statement: "Imagine how nerve-racking – terrifying, even – tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable? No one user is more deserving of that ability than another. Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of the user's voice." To the joy of open-government advocates and with the help of government transparency nonprofits, Twitter says it will work to get Politwoops up and running again. "Politwoops is an important tool for holding our public officials, including candidates and elected or appointed public officials, accountable for the statements they make, and we're glad that we've been able to reach an agreement with Twitter to bring it back online both in the U.S. and internationally," said Jenn Topper, communications director for The Sunlight Foundation
You don't need an agreement to record this stuff.
You do if you need access to the Twitter API to do it, and Twitter takes away said access, which is what they did.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Sure, it would have taken a little bit more effort, but this sort of thing should have been built using the standard Twitter interface, just follow all politicians using multiple anonymous accounts and then note whatever they delete. Then it would have been secure against any bull the lead Twits might decide whether it be blatantly revoking their access or secretly moderating their access. And you can't really say no one expected there would be an attempt to shut it down.
Another stupid thing is expecting to be able to publish something publicly, and then keep it a secret.
Finally, the Twits thought they could shut down this service, even though lots of people wanted it and the only way to really stop it would be to shut down their own company entirely.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
It is estimated that on average, deleted tweets by politicians contain exactly 10 times more truth than the ones they didn't delete
is Twitter itself.
We should be discomfited if not greatly concerned that arguably our most precious possession, speech, is arbitrated by private companies like Twitter and Facebook.
Is there a technical reason the same functionality can't be achieved without using the API?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Or letters, or live speeches, or just TALKING to people?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
That's a given, and I'd be surprised if it isn't like that already.
The "problem" from the politician's point of view is that they cannot retroactively not have said something that WAS popular but isn't anymore. Populists are very eager to say whatever seems popular today, no matter who they piss off, only to turn around and proclaim the exact opposite the next day, relying (rightfully) on their voters not remembering what they said days before.
That strategy doesn't work anymore when there is a perfect record of what was said.
Still, I don't think that the reinstatement has anything to do with political parties now being better "shielded" against it. It was simply the squeaky wheel in action. Twitter got a request from political parties to take down that nuisance, so they did. Why? Because it's the easier thing to do for Twitter, if they have to decide between some noname twitter account and getting political powers up against them, you are simply gone. Then they noticed the stink this caused on other fronts, from various non-profits, who can really make your life miserable if they want to, along with the looming threat of vigilante activists that could aim at Twitter (now that there isn't a more promising target on the radar, any reason works), which has a bigger chance to cut into Twitter's bottom line than the hurt feelings of political parties who can't really do anything against them directly due to the 1st.
So they reverse their stance and side with the other one. I wouldn't read any more into it, Twitter just sides with whoever can cause them more trouble if they don't get their way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So you want me to vote for a politician that can't keep his own account safe? How should he keep the country safe?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This being Slashdot and all, ever heard of such technology as "web crawlers" or "web scraping"?
Until some politician like this claims "harassment" because their malicious tweets are permanent parts of the public record. Never mind the fact that a lot of politicians could stand to take a heaping dose of "harassment" for the garbage that they spew and do on a regular basis. When the right one, probably a liberal democrat, crybullies Twitter hard enough, they'll pull the plug.
Because that's what they do. This is a site that banned Milo Yiannopoulos for a while, but has never touched Randi Harper's accounts despite the fact that the former is a journalist and the latter a female troll so bad that a major open source community was willing to risk opprobrium by asking her to leave.
Exactly what I was going to say...Twitter is playing it both ways to help their side. Awfully shady...
Tell that to Hillary who hires the first person who can spell "I-T" to manage her server.
Imagine how nerve-racking â" terrifying, even â" tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?
in the tricky world of social media, You can call your product "customers" and insist theyre a close friend of the brand. you can insist your "service" is in fact to their benefit for communication when in fact it is merely a portal into which you collect their content. But the real danger comes when a majority of the cattle consider your social media offering a democratic and/or community project outside your definitions of the words.
twitter, facebook, instagram --any social site really-- operates on the model of a large farm. The cattle are free to eat as much as they want, sleep as much as they want, and produce as much as they want so long as they dont kick or bite the other cattle, and so long as they dont produce bad milk or meat for the actual customer. Twitter shut down politwoops because it was bad for their brand to make the most important cattle unappealing in the marketplace.
Good people go to bed earlier.
There is a vicious rumour that he once said something sensible. That could totally ruin his reputation.
"Imagine how nerve-racking – terrifying, even – tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable? "
Like Slashdot?
That is, if you aren't the 'church' of Scientology.
Seems like some politicians could use this to their own advantage. Post duplicate mundane tweets like "I voted 'No' on HB 121", then delete the extra. Then this Twitter feed basically becomes a second sounding board for their actual Tweets. Took me about 10 seconds to figure out how to game this, should probably only take the average politician a few days.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It also wouldn't be a huge surprise if experience suggested that the bad-PR tweets that actually gain traction are typically the ones that people capture and distribute in awful-mobile-app-screenshot form, rather than the systematic but mostly uninteresting automated collections of every tweet some twit attempted to untweet.
If, in practice, the juiciest accidental honesty is already being captured manually you just end up looking like you have something to hide by selectively denying API access. Plus, in absence of a suitably robust search tool, a flood of mostly uninteresting noise is a fair deterrent to all but the most enthusiastic investigators(who are probably already operating less visible equivalents of the same tool for 'opposition research' purposes tied to various campaigns).
If, god help us, twitter is still relevant in a couple of decades this may come back to bite them, since the automatic logs of what future presidential candidates said while campaigning for their entry-level positions in local markets today will probably be available; but in terms of immediate PR handling I suspect that a lot of the good stuff gets scraped up by humans without automated assistance.
Any situation where you end up having to trust the clients is more or less entirely hopeless. Team DRM has spent years and a great deal of money and effort demonstrating this; and they are working from a much stronger legal position that twitter is; the twits can deny API access but have effectively zero leverage over basic web scraping tools, where the DRM people can usually at least ensure that noncompliant clients are theoretically illegal.
Perhaps more dangerously(for the politicians, not that this is a bad thing) it's a largely false hope. If some pesky bunch of idealists is running a collection of deleted tweets just because it warms their hearts can you really believe that your opponent's campaign isn't going to be poring over your history with substantially greater motivation?
Mandatory Permissive Action Links for all providers of idiotic 'social' platforms. Surely this is an easy question?
Scraping would probably annoy Twitter and be a violation of their TOS, so they'd dislike you for it to start with - if not eventually block you, which is "technical". It'd also be slower, possibly too slow for you to keep track of all the pages you're interested in all the time. You might even have to execute the page's javascript to make sure you're seeing everything that a user would. And there's likely extra data available from the API that can't be found in (or inferred from) a scrape.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's ad revenue. Twitter finally noticed that the "tweets" that often get erased by these bozos are being captured on screenshots anyway and being shared via imgur or some other image hosting site so their action of taking this down over the summer had only a minimal net effect on protecting the people who complained about it. Now that they have started this branch of their service up again, there will be no need for anyone to screenshot and repost the offending comment so the revenue from the ads will go into Twitter's pockets instead of another sources.
You only have to look at any major national newspaper's want ads to realise that "Political Twitter Correspondent" is an actual job. The candidates probably have some say in what gets posted, but they are not the ones typing this stuff out anymore then the actors who hire publicists to do the exact same thing.
Imagine a world where you are accountable for what you say on the internet!
There are 3rd party sites that scrape the entirety of Twitter, but they are expensive to access. My company looked into it for doing some "Google flu trends" type analysis, but decided the information was mostly useless and not worth the money spent on Twitter feed access.
It would be even more expensive for an individual to scrape the entirety of Twitter. Too much for someone running a free site to handle.
Maybe just scrape targeted politicians' feeds would be doable though. But then things would slip through the cracks of "oh, we did not know this person was important enough to scrape at the time they made the gaff".
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
follow all politicians using multiple anonymous accounts and then note whatever they delete.
The client ID of the application for archiving politicians' Tweets could be blocked, and the user account doing this following could be blocked. In addition, Twitter limits an account to following about 5,000 other accounts until the account itself has a substantial (undisclosed) number of followers. That limits the number of jurisdictions whose legislatures a single account can archive.
So I only have the choice between a party that can't get IT secured and a party where the majority of the people who have a say can't spell it without an accident.
Either way I'm fucked.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Admitting that you can't do something or even (*GASP*) that you did something wrong?
That's a surefire way to not get elected. Most voters prefer perfect candidates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Worse, still: What they twittered long before their political career started. Just imagine what idiocy we would have been spared if some president's exploits during his college years would have been easily accessible via ancient twitter posts.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Tell that to Hillary who hires the first person who can spell "I-T" to manage her server.
At least it's better than hiring Robert "Pennywise" Gray.
Imagine a world where a fleeting indiscretion is worth a life sentence. People with bladder problems already have to deal with this when a first offense of public urination lands them on the sex offender registry.
Twitter said: "deleting a tweet is an expression of the user's voice"
This is so funny I don't even know where to begin.
So that is why you can't find a single twit on Google. It must be because Twitter won't let their crawler scrape their content.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Because clearly, a politician should be able to censor things they say after the fact. This is why all the debates are behind by an hour, just in case the politician wants to take back something they said in the debate.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
...where what you say in public can be recorded and kept indefinitely.
Like the evening news. Or some person with a cell phone recording a speech. Or you publish an article in a magazine or newspaper.
Hey, so, like, when you put something out for the public, then it's... public.
Love sees no species.
They get something out of it by letting Google index it. If someone does it for their own purposes they might well take a different tack.
Amazon Store pages are all over Google, but their TOS still forbids scraping, and they actively combat it to the extent that most attempts to view a product page via PHP over TOR fail and return a CAPTCHA.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Imagine how nerve-racking – terrifying, even – tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?
Like posting on /. ?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Every tweet IS immutable and irrevocable. Click 'delete' all you want - once Twatter has your data, it never forgets. This is true of all adsurveillance-funded "free" services.
Dissident subjects of financial-totalitarian surveillance states would do well to observe an old Vatican maxim: Think much, speak little, write nothing down.
Or Sony's! Oh, wait...
I would not rely on that. Yes, people are stupid and they think that it's something you can't avoid, but they fully expect their politician to be able to avoid it.
People are irrational and consider odd things "good". How else do you explain TV programs and election results?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now that you mention it? I've never, to the best of my recollection, gotten a result from Twitter to any search that I've ever done. Yes, I can probably craft a query to bring up a result and yet I've never noticed one and certainly never clicked on one. However, I'm fairly attentive and I've never even seen one.
There are probably many reasons why this is the case with the most prominent being the nature of things that I search for. I've seen Facebook results. I've found Fark, Slashdot, and Reddit. I think I may have even seen Pinrrest and even clicked on it (but never actually figured out what the point of that site was - it was a bunch of people stealing things and being proud of it, I'm pretty sure that was Pintrest) but I do not recollect ever seeing a Twitter result.
I've seen and clicked on results that included content *from* Twitter. They'll have such embedded in their site/article. I've seen other sites that had them linked and whatnot. But no, I've never seen them in any search result (that I remember) and I'm pretty positive that, if I had, I didn't click on 'em.
That said, I can't tell if your comment was serious or sarcasm. ;-) Intonation and inflection aren't easily conveyed via text. I also have absolutely no clue if Google is allowed to index Twitter or not. :/ I suppose I could, you know, Google it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I kind of pride myself on being willing to be held accountable for what I say. Right or wrong, I said it and I own it. I may make mistakes and that's okay - I'll learn something. I'm okay with that and that's why I generally post with my username or identify myself in posts if they're AC posts.
I like being held responsible. I like having to defend my beliefs. I like having to have to back up my statements with facts. I like being challenged.
I'm not afraid to make a mistake or fail. I'm afraid to repeat mistakes and not have tried in the first place. When I screw up, and I will, I want you to tell me. I don't want to be coddled. I don't want a participating trophy. I want to learn, to grow, and to improve. I've been making use of the internet for this very thing for somewhere near 30 years. You, the internet participant, have helped me adjust my philosophy and learn to be more critical of my thinking.
I, for one, am grateful for that and I'd not have it any other way. That, in and of itself, is something learned - I used to not want such things. I used to want to have people accept what I said as correct. No, now (thanks to you) I want to be challenged, I want flaws pointed out, and I want to know when I've reached a logically inconsistent conclusion. I want to be able to use logic and reason my way to sound conclusions. I think, if nothing else, it has made me a happier person and kept me motivated to learn and continually improve.
A fool is the person who thinks they have all the answers and never need to change their minds or learn new things. An idiot is the person who parrots them and believes them. It all goes back to, and I think this is actually one of my best features - if I may say so myself, my having learned to shut the hell up and listen to people who are smarter than I. I don't know everything and I sort of hope I never think I do. The hard part is letting go of the ego and being introspective and honest enough to know when you need to ask for help.
Meh, but what do I know?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I wouldn't even know what to search for, as I have never actually looked at Twitter. Very likely, the issue is that Twitter's robots.txt prevents Google from indexing the messages on Twitter.
I was making a point though that scraping is another term for spiders, of which Google is one.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
"Imagine how nerve-racking -- terrifying, even -- being a politician would be if they were held accountable for what they said?"
FTFY.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Oh, I got your point (I think) but I found it unusual that a site would actually block Google - a site of that nature. I've not looked into it but I presume it must? I've literally never gotten a result from there - as far as I know. I don't actually follow twitter so I don't know if they actually *do* block Google or not but I presume they must (I'd never thought of it before) and find it an odd choice.
Assuming they do, I wonder what the motivation is?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
https://www.twitter.com/robots...
They disallow all. As for why, it may be technical, or it could be to prevent abuse, who knows.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?