

Eulogy for Politwoops - waffle_ss
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2015/06/04/eulogy-for-politwoops/

======
ColinWright

       We are truly mystified as to what prompted the change
       of heart, and it's deeply disappointing to see Twitter
       kill a project they had supported since 2012.  It is
       also disturbing to us that our feed was cut almost
       three weeks ago and our only direct communication came
       from Twitter last night, when we were told that their
       decision was not something that we could appeal, and,
       most surprisingly, they were not interested in reviewing
       any of the email conversation from 2012.  Clearly,
       something changed — and we’re not likely to ever know
       what it was.
    

The cynic in me says that some politician has leaned on a friend who knows
someone high up in Twitter.

------
danso
So I'm a huge supporter and fan of Sunlight and Politwoops, and agree that
Twitter's abrupt cutoff and non-explanation, as described, is off-
putting...but I do not fault Twitter for taking this stand as a company.

1\. The loss of public transparency is somewhat minimal... I mean, the reason
why we are able to track politicians on Twitter in any capacity is mainly
because, well, Twitter exists. This is a much different ballpark than, say,
how police departments obscure their crime data by offloading it to a private
piece of shit web company at taxpayer dime [1]

2\. No one's stopping you or anyone from creating a daily, hourly, or even by-
the-minute archive of anybody's Tweets...or even just leaving your browser
open on a Twitter page for a very long time and capturing and saving the push
updates. The problem to Twitter here is letting someone very publicly break
their terms of service. And I doubt it's even the TOS violation that's the big
issue...even though the methods of Politwoops are no secret (here's the source
code [2])...the impression that the average person has, when reading a story
about the latest Poltiwoop catch...is that Twitter is not only a service where
you will get humiliated because of a 140-character mistake, but that as a
user, your mistakes are available to the public in perpetuity. If you're
thinking " _Well, the average person knows that the stakes for social media
account terms and conditions is inherently different for elected officials and
will trust social media companies to honor that inherent truth_ "...then you
obviously have not talked to an average person in a long time.

3\. If you're convinced that the average user knows that the rules/TOS are
different based on publicly elected status...well, what about other public
officials? What about the city manager and their staff? How about the police
chief? How about individual police officers? If you're going to say, " _Well,
obviously NOT police officers, because they are people, and they have families
and are not high on the decision-making chain_ "...Another person could sanely
argue that, _" Well, every police officer has taxpayer-granted escalated
privileges to deprive citizens of freedom and life, why shouldn't we have the
right to see if they say something fucked up on Twitter?"_ It's not a simple
debate, and we haven't even gotten to other types of public figures (i.e.
celebrities and other newsmakers). You sure the average person can sift the
nuance and be assured that their tweets are granted the sanctity of being a
non-public figure?

4\. If you're thinking, "Well, users _should_ be made more aware of how
illusionary their privacy is on social media"...I completely agree. However, I
don't agree that Twitter should be compelled into letting an independent
organization use Twitter's resources and break Twitter's TOS to implicitly
communicate that epiphany to Twitter's own users.

[1] [http://recode.net/2014/05/05/is-your-citys-crime-data-
privat...](http://recode.net/2014/05/05/is-your-citys-crime-data-private-
property/)

[2]
[https://github.com/sunlightlabs/politwoops](https://github.com/sunlightlabs/politwoops)

