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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.
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.
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.
There is a vicious rumour that he once said something sensible. That could totally ruin his reputation.
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?
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.
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.
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.