Twitter To Revive Politwoops, Archive of Politicians' Deleted Tweets (reuters.com) 106
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
There must be something else (Score:1)
I remember not being surprised when it was shut down and I find my surprise at this announcement tempered by the thought that there must be something else in play.
I'm wondering if, during the period that it was shut down, that various political parties have been able to set up some sort of moderation program. This would operate such that a politicians tweets would first go to party central moderation for clearance for public submission.
Nobody in the "free" world would do that you say? Well, people pretty mu
Re:There must be something else (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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.
You're overthinking this (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 throug
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Is there a technical reason the same functionality can't be achieved without using the API?
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This being Slashdot and all, ever heard of such technology as "web crawlers" or "web scraping"?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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https://www.twitter.com/robots... [twitter.com]
They disallow all. As for why, it may be technical, or it could be to prevent abuse, who knows.
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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.
Stupidity everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Blocking and follow limits (Score:2)
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.
Truth (Score:5, Funny)
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My worry is that this will just make politicians less honest and frank. They will carefully screen every tweet with a team of analysts first. Of course some do now, but this could make it worse.
Maybe we need to accept that people make mistakes, and politicians aren't going to be perfect. Deleting tweets makes them more human and trustworthy, because anyone who never screws up isn't a real person.
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I do wonder how things are operating at the Trump and Sanders campaigns but I have been in a few offices of state politicians in recent years and they have a "professional social media person" that does all the tweeting, facebook posting, etc. Other folks on the campaign team and maybe the candidate themselves occasional gives them a vague message to get out there, but that person chose the specific language, media platforms, etc.
I highly doubt Hilliary, Jeb, Cruz, Christy etc do their own posts. So ther
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I'm pretty sure Trump runs his own Twitter account. I suppose it's possible his campaign staff has access to it too, but Trump's whole appeal is that he's honest. He says what he thinks and he doesn't apologize for it and that's what's winning him support.
Sanders on the other hand is blatantly being run by a social media team. I'm unfortunate enough to have Bernheads as friends who constantly repeat the stupid crap Sanders posts so I end of having to see it all the freaking time. Apparently he signs the few
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My worry is that this will just make politicians less honest and frank
My worry is that this is not possible anymore.
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We complain that politicians lie, but the ones that tell the truth never get elected.
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Or get slammed in the media. Just look at all the stupid shit the media says about Trump.
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My worry is that this will just make politicians less honest and frank.
How could politicians possibly be less honest?
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Maybe my high school math is failing me, but ten times zero ...
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Or letters, or live speeches, or just TALKING to people?
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Perhaps more dangerously(for the politicians, not that this is
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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 mist
The best argument against using Twitter (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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No one is forcing you to use said private companies services. Don't like terms and conditions? Stay away.
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No one is forcing you to use said private companies services. Don't like terms and conditions? Stay away.
Yes, you're free to do that on an individual basis. However, if we reach a situation where the bulk of the population depends on these services to express themselves then society in general may potentially have a problem. My initial objection to Facebook was that it's a sort of privately controlled "sub-internet" where people make a Facebook page that they don't really control instead of a webpage that they can fully control. Of course Facebook is also much more than that, because people's profiles are link
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If a substantial fraction of swing voters are among "the segment of the population who fell for the trap", then ignoring "the segment of the population who fell for the trap" will cause you to fail to miss trends.
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"If you don't want to be spied on don't use a phone." At some point telephones went from a private service offered by a private entity to being something considered basic. We now find it horrifying that AT&T et al can listen to our phone calls, randomly disconnect us, route calls to where ever they want. Hey they are private businesses so what expectation of privacy do you have right?
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At this rate, the White House will have its own reality show by the fall season.
They do and people pay big money for it. We usually call it by another name but the end result is much the same. We call it, "Campaign Season."
You didn't think you were being fed anything other than entertainment, did you? Dude, we even fucking vote 'em off the island. They even have corporate sponsorship. They have teams, rallies, and games to determine who is and who is not preferred by their peers and the audience.
How the fuck can it be anything less than reality television?
Caveat: Err... I'm not actuall
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So you want me to vote for a politician that can't keep his own account safe? How should he keep the country safe?
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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.
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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 [wikia.com].
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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.
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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?
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Comment removed (Score:3)
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Trump will be worried (Score:2)
Irrevocable it should be (Score:2)
"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.
Strategy (Score:2)
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You can't unsay things. (Score:1)
Like the sex offender registry? (Score:2)
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.
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Hoot of Derision (Score:1)
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.
Imagine a World... (Score:3)
...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.
Been here, done that. (Score:2)
Imagine how nerve-racking – terrifying, even – tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?
Like posting on /. ?
Irony (Score:2)
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.
Adjusted quote (Score:2)
"Imagine how nerve-racking -- terrifying, even -- being a politician would be if they were held accountable for what they said?"
FTFY.