Twitter closes off ability to track and repost politicians’ deleted tweets

Twitter has shut down the ability of 30 accounts to automatically monitor and re-post politicians’ deleted tweets.

Thestar.com
Aug. 24, 2015
By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours

Twitter has shut off the ability of more than two dozen accounts to track and repost tweets deleted by politicians and other officials in 30 countries around the world, including Canada.

Twitter suspended access on Friday to 30 accounts that automatically monitored tweets posted then removed from the social media platform by politicians, diplomats and embassies.

The accounts, Politwoops and Diplotwoops, were set up by the Open State Foundation (OSF), a digital transparency group based in the Netherlands.

“Publishing ... something on the Internet even though you might regret it, it’s still part of the public record or of parliamentary history,” OSF director Arjan El Fassed told the Star in a phone interview Monday afternoon.

“In that sense, the public has a right to know.”

El Fassed said deleted tweets archived before Friday and the accounts themselves will remain online, but they can no longer capture newly-deleted tweets.

“Anything after Friday, politicians are free to post and delete whatever they want. But before that (the tweets) are still online.”

In an e-mailed statement, Twitter Canada said: “The ability to delete one’s Tweets, for whatever reason, has been a long-standing feature of Twitter for all users. We built into our developer-policy provisions a requirement that those accessing our APIs delete content that Twitter reports as deleted or expired.”

An API (application programming interface) is a set of rules for how developers use an application. On Twitter, APIs enable users to set parameters and automatically retweet certain posts.

Twitter said it had identified accounts that archived and highlighted deleted tweets, and suspended their access to its APIs. “We take our commitment to our users seriously and will continue to defend and respect our users’ voices in our product and platform.”

The Politwoops feeds monitored deleted tweets in 30 countries, including Canada, Australia, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Tunisia, India and several countries across Europe.

In Canada, the posts were archived in partnership with PoliTwitter.ca, a website that has tracked politicians’ deleted tweets since 2011.

Christopher Parsons, a fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, said Twitter’s decision shows that the company “is unwilling to have its API routinely used to monitor what people have tried to delete.

“It appears as though Twitter is saying, ‘Look we know it’s possible, but we don’t want it being done.”

Twitter suspended the U.S. version of Politwoops in May, telling Gawker that it was a privacy issue.

“Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress.”

Chris Gates, president of the Sunlight Foundation, which ran the American Politwoops account, said that, as public figures, “elected officials and candidates ... don’t have the same expectation of privacy as a private individual.

“Unfortunately, what we’ve learned is that public tweets don’t belong to the public. 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.

While most deleted tweets grabbed by Politwoops were due to typos or broken links, the feeds also sometimes captured politicians’ attempts to delete embarrassing mistakes or outbursts.

U.S. Senator John McCain mocked the tears of a newly-re-elected Vladimir Putin in 2012, but then deleted the tweet after two minutes.

In March, Politwoops archived a tweet from Stephen Harper in which he mistakenly tagged the Toronto Raptors’ Kyle Lowry in a photo with Anthony Bennett.

According to Parsons, the weekend Twitter closures may force groups to analyze the different reasons tweets are deleted, rather than posting all deletions automatically, which could change the data’s impact.

“The way in which (the information is) published can be very different, the context can be much broader, and depending on the intent of the group in question, it could be more damning,” he said.

The debate, he added, shows the impact corporations such as Twitter can have on how public figures communicate with people.

“With the American election right now and the Canadian election going on, that’s where these sorts of deletions are often most interesting to the general public,” he said.