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Post Ghost Shutdown: An Open Letter to Twitter
- zod50 10y agoI wonder how politwoops is allowed to function when postghost is deleted.
- aaronbrethorst 10y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/technology/twitter-politwoops.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/technology/twitter-politwo...
- bnj 10y agoThey address this in their open letter- the politwoops api credentials appear to have been reauthorized based on their tracking a political figures, whereas postghost tracks a broader range of verified users spanning journalism and media
- asimuvPR 10y agoBrings some questions into my mind: Can the archive project or similar crawl twitter to save content? What kind of checks and balances should social media networks have? Supone they be regulated?
- homero 10y agoArchive projects usually listen to robots.txt
- unimpressive 10y agoArchiveTeam on the other hand is a bit more aggressive: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page Though they generally do last minute emergency backups of closing sites, so this probably isn't a job for them.
- dingo_bat 10y agoWhy doesn't PostGhost just record tweets using the browser? I'm sure it can be done without much problem. This is blatant abuse by Twitter. Public tweets are public, and the readers should be able to record/screenshot/save them, without Twitter having a say in the matter. If they don't allow using the API for that, use the browser directly.
- jonknee 10y agoCopyright issues don't go away if you capture via browser.
- homero 10y agoThen do it anonymously
- JoshTriplett 10y agoCopyright belongs to the person tweeting, not to Twitter (they just get a license from the person tweeting). And fair use specifically mentions "criticism, comment, news reporting, [...] scholarship, or research", several of which apply to reporting on deleted tweets from prominent public figures. This isn't a copyright issue at all; it's exclusively a ToS issue. Twitter can choose to prevent someone from using their API. They'd have a harder time forcing the takedown of the existing content.
- jonknee 10y agoYes, and what do you think of the person who deleted a tweet will say about you using their copyright? I would argue it is a copyright issue because by deleting content a user is saying they don't want anyone to access it. Why would Twitter then want to turn around and allow access to it through an API? As a user I think this is the right tack to take. There is no possible advantage for Twitter to have sites that make the delete feature not really work.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
- weberc2 10y agoI thought the Library of Congress was archiving all tweets? Perhaps I'm mistaken, or perhaps they do archive all tweets, but this archive isn't available via API such that PostGhost could rely on it? Or perhaps deleted tweets are also deleted from the LoC archive?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nl 10y agoThey were planning too, but never actually did it. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-twitter-archive-119698.html http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-tw...
- roywiggins 10y agoIn theory yes, in practice no. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-twitter-archive-119698.html http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-tw...
- poppppppppp123 10y agoWhat's the purpose of going through the API? Why wouldn't someone just set up crawlers for public figures in countries outside of jurisdiction. To be clear I'm not promoting that somebody do this, just wondering why there may not be a viable alternative that does it this way.
- Zyst 10y agoBecause it would still be against the Terms of Service and you still could get very much sued.
- bnj 10y agoIANAL but how would a foreign company get sued under US Law? I understand that it would violate the ToS if they conducted this directly through Twitter, and that may or may not be a big deal depending on the local Jurisprudence and other factors- but say an application was using the Twitter API to reproduce the tweets of persons of interest, and prompting deleting them as required-- what then is to prevent our foreign fictitious company from scraping THAT service? Twitter should not be asserting itself in this kind of overreach. Personally I look forward to it's continued decline in value.
- wpietri 10y agoAs my first lawyer explained to me, "Anybody can sue you for anything. The question isn't 'Can they sue me?', it's 'Can you afford to go the distance?'" Twitter has plenty of lawyers, and can afford to hire plenty more, including lawyers in whatever country you set this up in. They could go after owners, workers, hosting companies, ad providers, network providers, and anybody else with a significant connection. Who knows if they'd bother. But I don't think anybody should expect a simple dodge to make them completely safe.
- sergiotapia 10y agoWhat is this trend with Reddit, Twitter and Facebook suddenly going full gestapo and [REDACTED] everything? These kind of services are very important and if the companies don't want to play ball, then they should be circumvented to preserve the record.
- bionsuba 10y agoThe sad truth is (in the case of Reddit anyway) that allowing people to freely publish their opinions on your platform hurts your brand and your advertising revenue. This is why /r/creepshots was taken down, despite being completely legal and within the Reddit rules. It damaged the brand. Same reason why the "hate speech" against Islam was taken off of /r/news.
- Jerry2 10y ago>The sad truth is (in the case of Reddit anyway) that allowing people to freely publish their opinions on your platform hurts your brand and your advertising revenue. They're a user generated site (UGC). Truth is that their brand was mostly in the hands of their users from day one. And it's extremely hard to wrestle that control out of the hands of your users without suffering some pushback. In come cases, this pushback can even kill a site by making community disenfranchised. Reddit has been doing a lot of censorship lately and people are slowly leaving that site. By exerting more free speech restrictions, they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase. Here's an example of Reddit censorship in action: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06/13/redditors-checked-rnews-for-updates-on-the-orlando-shooting-instead-they-found-a-war/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06... And then there's this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06/17/trumps-meme-brigade-took-over-reddit-now-reddit-is-trying-to-stop-them/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06... And this is just creepy: ‘We know your dark secrets. We know everything.’ Boasts Reddit CEO Steve Huffman http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-your-dark-secrets/ http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-yo...
- rodgerd 10y ago
- lcnmrn 10y agoMaybe it’s time to give Sublevel a new try. It’s not perfect, but it’s orders of magnitude faster than Twitter.
- zouhair 10y agoThat's some crappy name.
- omni 10y agoYour comment history is filled with references to whatever Sublevel is, if you're affiliated you should be disclosing that in your comments. Additionally, a Twitter competitor has nothing to do with the current conversation unless it's also widely used by public figures to broadcast to millions of people.
- brador 10y agoWhat about a browser plugin where users could click and it takes a copy from their screen of the tweet they're seeing and sends it to the a project? Having multiple users send in the same tweet could count as additional validation that it was not edited.
- niftich 10y agoThis could work, but there's two separate problems to solve: knowing when a verified account tweets, and capturing the tweet in a way that doesn't provably infringe on the TOS. A crowdsourced capture solves the second stage, but only if someone in the crowd happens to be browsing the right page at the time an update is made. To make this work, someone can set up a 'shell company' that signs up for the Twitter API for a seemingly legitimate reason, and captures the actual events of verified accounts tweeting. Then, this service sends out events to all the crowdsourced clients to browse to the Twitter page and capture the content, and submit it to the project. The behavior of the crowdsourced clients would be undetectable from a normal web user, and there would be a layer of indirection between the client signed up for the Twitter API and the curators of the submitted tweets.
- sulam 10y agoTwitter has been shutting down API access to clients that don't honor deletions for years now. I don't know why this is news. Note: somehow deleted tweets get covered anyway. If someone is sufficiently public of a figure, Twitter's policy doesn't save them from being publicly shamed when they tweet something the world doesn't approve of. In fact you could easily argue that European law requires Twitter to disable this access. If I want to delete my online presence, surely being able to actually delete my tweets is as important as being able to delete things from the Google-cache.
- syshum 10y ago>>>I don't know why this is news. if you read the post by the company they clearly explain why this should be news. the fact that twitter allows at least one company to do this already IMO is enough to make ti news. Why can Politwoops exist but not this site?
- sulam 10y agoBecause they're doing different things? Also clearly outlined?
- ominous 10y ago"delete my tweets". Would you say a Major Influencer owns his public presence? Does Donald Trump own his words? Does J. K. Rowling? (as per the examples given in the letter). I honestly don't know. We hope you’ll consider the fact that as Twitter has become a dominant platform of communication, verified users with huge follower bases influence the public dialog as much as elected officials, and should be accountable for their public statements on Twitter just as they are for public statements they make anywhere else. I find it hard to believe that people agree with a Developer Agreement and Policy such as Twitter's. Do you? An 'agreement' orders you to delete content because it says so, and you agree with it? What if I use the API to flag content I want, then wget the relevant html. Would an API agreement have any say in that? Must all screenshots of deleted tweets be deleted? Articles about deleted tweets? Are the original tweeters forced to deny having tweeted what they did, unless Twitter undeleted theirs tweets? Even if taken to court? Sir, did you, or did you not, tweet that you want to acquire jell-o and take a bath in it Well, just check the API. It says I didn't tweet such thing Case closed Should I tweet my orders to my army of nuclear powered androids, and then delete it, so that no proof exists? Furthermore, the API exists in the world. The deleted tweet is a detail of the API and of the twitter infrastructure, that allows deletion. However, the fact that a specific tweet was deleted does not belong to the API, but to the meatspace. Are we to deny that a tweet was deleted? More than that, are we to deny that a specific tweet was sent at a specific date? Maybe the question really is, can a Developer Agreement and Policy change the world? How is this enforceable? It is new both because of Politifacts existence, and because we are letting an API agreement apply where it does not belong.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- notimetorelax 10y agoPostGhost might have been violating the european right to be forgotten. If this was the case then it was a good move on Twitter's part.
- 0xmohit 10y agoThis is what I make of the situation: - Foo tweets - Bar takes a snapshot of Foo's tweet - Foo deletes tweet - Bar displays Foo's deleted tweet on own website Twitter tells Bar to shut up. (Twitter would, however, continue to store the deleted tweet. It wouldn't display it, though.)