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Twitter has killed Politwoops, which monitored politicians' deleted tweets
- everyone 11y agoPolitwoops could circumvent this problem by just not publishing the tweets to twitter. They could just put them on a website, and maybe even aggregate the politicians other communications. No? Though generally I feel that anyone at all being judged on an instant 140 character message is pretty sad state of affairs. Meaningful debate (political and otherwise) with evidence based arguments and so on seems like a naive fantasy these days.
- mattzito 11y agoNo, alas - the Twitter terms of service are very clear. If you are storing a tweet, when someone deletes that tweet you have to delete all of your copies of it. Full stop.
- themartorana 11y agoThis feels very "right to be forgotten" which was almost universally reviled here. I'm actually surprised there isn't more discussion about the similarities (and similar possible negative outcomes) in light of Twitter's TOS and actions.
- MichaelGG 11y agoIt'd be very hard for Twitter to determine which API account is not honouring deletes.
- nathancahill 11y agoWhat? How would that be hard to determine? You need an API key to use the API.
- cinquemb 11y agoHere, have some api keys: https://github.com/search?l=php&p=4&q=access_token+access_token_secret+twitter&ref=searchresults&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93 https://github.com/search?l=php&p=4&q=access_token+access_to...
- MichaelGG 11y agoAnd how would Twitter know which API key somesitewithtweets.com is using? There are ways, but if the API key user is careful and doesn't allow arbitrary searches (so Twitter can't try searching #someguid and then kill that account) it'd be pretty hard for them to figure it out. They could try adding fake deleted tweets on a per-account basis, then seeing who publishes those. A simple two-account double check or manual intervention would prevent that from leaking info.
- incepted 11y agoSo what? How do you connect that API key to some anonymous web site that saves deleted tweets? The only way I can think of is for Twitter to publish different deleted tweets to different API keys and then see which one the web site surfaces. Not very hard but not trivial either.
- chisleu 11y agopublish it somewhere it is magically picked up by a 3rd party who isn't bound by the TOS and republishes somewhere. problem solved.
- WalterSear 11y agoThen retweet it.
- jbigelow76 11y agoThen just eschew the Twitter API and scrape the website, then tell Twitter to go pound sand. Doesn't do anything about getting hit with a frivolous lawsuit but that's a different topic.
- zeckalpha 11y agoThat would violate the Twitter ToS, too: https://twitter.com/tos https://twitter.com/tos
- jbigelow76 11y agoTerms of Service never stops a unicorn.
- ConfuciusSay 11y agoIf their TOS prevents someone from taking a photograph of their website on a screen, it probably wouldn't hold up in court.
- zeckalpha 11y agoThen will Politwoops take Twitter to court for fair use of the API?
- ConfuciusSay 11y agoProbably not Politwoops, because they were using the API. But perhaps a successor that did not use the API, but scraped and screenshoted only might have a good chance.
- jdmaresco 11y agoWhy not just store them in the blockchain, where there's no possibility of erasing them? Do the TOS require you to only store them in mutable data storage?
- x0ra 11y agoWhen SJW screen caputer offending tweet which are then deleted (say, during the height of #GG), Twitter takes no action, but when some anti-corruption organisation do, they are nuked... I wonder how much pressure Twitter had from elected official to take this stance...
- linkydinkandyou 11y agoAnd twitter wonders why they can't find a revenue model that works.
- adventured 11y agoThey already found one. They'll likely hit $3.5 billion in annual revenue within two years. One year after that, they'll be the size of Yahoo (which is 12 years older than Twitter). They're already on a revenue ramp dramatically better than the one Netflix has had. If that isn't a model that works, I can't wait to see the one that does. Twitter's primary financial problem is an unnecessarily bloated cost structure.
- poopsintub 11y agoThey spend a ton on data centers and talent. Last quarter there was no user growth and profit per share was 7 cents. Shareholders definitely don't agree with you about this.
- ghayes 11y agoPlus, to compare it to Yahoo! is obviously a bit of a self-defeating analogy (as Yahoo! is struggling in most of its operations).
- adventured 11y agoYahoo is one of the largest consumer tech companies on earth with $4.6 billion in sales. Yahoo's problem isn't their size today, it's their lack of sales growth for ten years. Twitter doesn't have a lack of sales growth.
- adventured 11y agoWhat's not to agree with exactly? The fact is they grew sales 61% - with zero user growth. For a company that large to be growing that fast, they're very clearly having no problems with growing the business. They need 47% growth in the next four quarters, and then 36% growth in the four quarters after that, to hit $3.5 billion in sales. Given first quarter growth was 74%, then second quarter growth was 61%, it's not a far stretch to hit 47% over the next four. Shareholders have sent the stock down on the basis of user growth, not sales growth. Twitter has three problems. 1) They're not Facebook, it is not about users, and they should stop trying to be something other than a broadcast platform. It's about consumption. 2) They were extremely overvalued right out of the gate. There was a lot of delusional thinking around their potential. There's one Facebook, there isn't going to be another any time soon. Twitter will never be another Google type company. 3) They're carrying vastly more cost in their business than they need to. They have 36% the head count of Facebook, with 12% of the sales. They've stacked the business on the premise they were going to be a massive company like Facebook - they're not, it's time to adjust costs accordingly.
- kelukelugames 11y agoI'm 100% for non public figures to have their tweets deleted. Different case for publicly elected officials.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- smegel 11y ago> was extensively used by the media to investigate instances of deception, corruption and ineptitude. Because getting an intern to hack up a 5 minute Python script to do the same is too much effort? OK maintaining a list of current politicians current Twitter accounts is probably where the work is, but if you are interested in a number of prominent accounts this is not that hard a task.
- hanniabu 11y agoComments like this make me realize how little I know >.<
- patrickdavey 11y agoHow exciting!! lots to learn :)
- patrickaljord 11y agoThe twitter api allows to get a feed per author name, so if you have a list of users, that's pretty easy. All you need to do is use a basic http client lib in your prefered language to do the http query and then some basic html css skills to show the result there :)
- hanniabu 11y agoI've never worked with the twitter api, but now that you mention that, I see where you're going with it. Does seem pretty straight forward now.
- A_COMPUTER 11y agoHere: http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ It's a perl script that can hook into Twitter stream API. Sign up for an account, create an access token for ttytter, start subscribing to politicians, and it will suck down every tweet they make in realtime as they make them. If they make a tweet and delete it 30 seconds later, you'll have captured it. That is why whining about deletability of tweets is pointless, anybody with entry-level Linux skills can monitor thousands of politicians.
- tptacek 11y agoI can't blame them. These things are incredibly toxic to the Twitter community. Already, you have to warn everyone who joins the site not to delete anything because people run services that highlight things that get deleted. I mean that descriptively, not normatively. I mean: no matter how you slice the public interest, these things are clearly harmful to Twitter itself. Obviously, blocking them doesn't actually help the situation; once you publish something on the Internet, it's out there, and people can come up with 100 different ways to get around Twitter's restrictions.
- Mithaldu 11y agoI don't believe repeating this viewpoint is useful. It is a kneejerk reaction that in my opinion fails to take the actual situation into account. This wasn't a service monitoring everyone, this was a service monitoring elected officials, whose statements, whatever they are, are part of the public record. This is especially important as particularly politicians derive a lot of their power from what they say (and often promise) to their constituents, regardless of whether they actually stick to what they say or not.
- girvo 11y agoWhile I personally feel that Twitter taking down this service is a shame, and yet another sign of how reliance on these private companies for expression of free speech is never going to work, tptacek is right. When it comes down to it, Twitter as a private company is completely allowed to do this, and in fact it is in their interest to do so; these services harm Twitter as a whole, despite being (in my opinion) a net good for society. Of course Twitter would act in it's own interests here.
- themartorana 11y agoThere's a lot that is legal that is morally reprehensible. Like bringing the world to the brink of financial collapse and then having governments bail out the institutions responsible while absolutely no one went to jail for the crime. Sure Twitter is allowed to do this. It has nothing to do with whether the attempt to alter (or delete) history is morally reprehensible or not.
- gjolund 11y agoYeah but they didn't kill the api's that ran the service. Seems like a someone on the twitter board got a call on a red phone.
- gruez 11y ago>Imagine how nerve-wracking – terrifying, even – tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable? Then don't tweet dumb stuff? The implication that tweets - and by extension, history - should be mutable feels like 1984.
- tptacek 11y agoYou can stop reading your comment after the first three words for the real lesson. Politicians will just pay anodyne spokedroids to manage their accounts for them.
- joshstrange 11y agoI'm confused. Are you suggesting that we should follow twitter's TOS on this matter and be done with it because eventually politicians and the like will just work harder to filter what they say? What's to stop someone from creating a service for themselves that has similar TOS (Anything published if later deleted MUST be removed from any data store containing it) then they use said service to communicate everything they want to say essentially giving them an undo/delete button for everything? This sounds terrible to me.
- kennywinker 11y agoI think this gets at the root of the decision at Twitter. They were faced with a problem: they want public figures to tweet, but tweeting can be risky. Killing Politwoops makes it just a little safer, and thus they hope more public figures will adopt the service. Frankly, I think it's a bad call. If Twitter is infrastructure, it wouldn't work that way, but Twitter isn't infrastructure it's a company and I can see why it makes sense to do that as a company. It's almost like capitalism doesn't make for good government watchdogs...?
- delish 11y agoI agree with > The implication that tweets - and by extension, history - should be mutable feels like 1984. You've pointed out the problem: people in a democracy need access to the truest history possible; mutable history is a slippery slope. But I disagree with > Then don't tweet dumb stuff? The challenges we're facing are new, and need new solutions. Political entities are acting on incomplete information and perspective; inevitably, they'll tweet dumb stuff (like I and many on HN have). I'm not saying that they should be able to delete tweets, I'm saying that politicians haven't had this ability before. Now that they have it, we (the democracy) have to decide what to do about it. "Don't tweet dumb stuff" is impractical and simplistic (sorry!). Considering a democratic populace wants from its leaders intelligence, strategy, and (at least in the US) authenticity, American leaders will be struggling with a tension between authenticity and advertisement. This struggle leads to the deleting of tweets. I don't know the solution; knowing the solution is a different matter.
- krisdol 11y agoIf you've ever worked with Twitter's API, you should know that not honoring deletes on your app is against the TOS. It doesn't matter what accounts are being monitored, when a tweet is deleted by the account, you have to delete it from your server.
- wslh 11y agoDetecting another liar politician supersedes any API policy. You can also say that Snowden leaks are against the law but the importance of his relevations makes arguing about a ToS or law very naive.
- solistice 11y agoI think there might be some mixing up of the morality of the situation and the legality of the situation. Were the Snowden leaks against the law? Yes. Were the Snowden leaks immoral? I'd say no, they were an incredibly brave thing to do. Now a situation like that where the moral thing is against the law would require us reexamining and changing the law. Whether it's whistleblower laws, minimum sentences or sentences for minor drug offences, these things all require a good hard look, and most likely, a degree of retroactive pardoning. But believing one's cause to supercede the law is a dangerous road to be on. Now ToS are completely different. ToS are set by private entities, and as a single user you have little power over their content, only whether you accept them or not. They're an offer, not a democracy. I personally think that if you choose to knowingly violate the ToS of a service, then you should face the consequences of that regardless of the moral standing you may have. If you were using the Twitter API to defeat african warlords and Twitter decides that you're violating their ToS doing that and bans your account for it, well...you're SoL.
- wslh 11y ago> If you were using the Twitter API to defeat african warlords and Twitter decides that you're violating their ToS doing that and bans your account for it, well...you're SoL. Not so fast, you can always use web scraping techniques as a defensive measure.
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- r721 11y agoCan't one manually archive "interesting" tweets with archive.org or archive.is? Or their problem was with the scale of operations?
- brlewis 11y agoI reworded Twitter's statement to make its nonsense more obvious: Imagine how nerve-wracking -- terrifying, even -- making public statements would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?
- x0ra 11y agoespecially for elected official, whose opinions fluctuate as much as it does. It would be bad to have a anti-union statement pop back up when you need union support in the current election.
- danso 11y agoFor those unfamiliar with the Twitter API: the Streaming API pushes out notifications of when users who are eligible to show up in your timeline (i.e. users whom you follow) have deleted a message: https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview/messages-types#status_deletion_notices_delete https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview/messages-types#st... Politiwoops used monitored this to see which tweets it has previously collected were now deleted. You can peruse the Politwoops source code to see the details: https://github.com/sunlightlabs/politwoops-tweet-collector https://github.com/sunlightlabs/politwoops-tweet-collector Twitter's complaint is that its terms of service forbids ignoring those deletion messages...but in the past, Twitter had turned a blind eye to what Politwoops was doing. Whatever the reason for the crackdown now, it doesn't mean you can't manually try to track these embarrassing tweets and then publish them under fair use protections...in fact, the Anthony Weiner scandal, in which a user noticed an accidentally posted DM, was what sparked Politwoops in the first place. It's just you can't do it on a wide-scale, automated basis via API. I'm kind of surprised Politwoops informal waiver lasted this long...or rather, that no one else has applied its open source code to the tracking of celebrities...if that had ever happened (say, as an informal service of TMZ or Gawker), I have no doubt Twitter would shut that down, as celebrities would be spooked by having their mistakes be essentially non-deletable...and their protests would carry a lot more notice than politicians'. edit: Another relevant link: the unitedstates/congress-legislators repo, which is a crowdsourced listing (augmented by a automated framework) of Congress social media accounts: https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators
- hfpn 11y agoImagine what Hilary might have deleted from her private emails if politicians try to delete what is public
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pvdebbe 11y agoI wonder what's going to happen with the RSS feeds of tweets. They usually get everything verbatim, and if readers read from it often enough, the tweet's done.
- totony 11y agoI find it odd that no one compares this to real life: If I say "Tom said y", it is perfectly okay, why is this any different online? Why should what you say online be treated any different than what you say in front of other people?
- ikurei 11y agoWhat about turning the service to an events feed yous suscribe to? If it's just a log of "Politician X tweeted Y ... Politician X deleted tweet Y", would that be against the TOS too? You aren't storing tweets, just emailing or RSS'ing them, do you still have to delete them? EDIT: spelling
- lcswi 11y agoWe need more decentralised, distributed, censorship resistant service.