
Post Ghost Shutdown: An Open Letter to Twitter - doctorshady
http://postghost.com/Home/Shutdown/
======
sulam
Twitter 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
>>>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
Because they're doing different things? Also clearly outlined?

------
dingo_bat
Why 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.

~~~
niftich
Using a 'browser' from their base-of-operations in an automated manner would
fit the definition of scraping, which is not allowed by Twitter's TOS.

~~~
madeofpalk
What are they going to do if they break the TOS? It's not like the developer
agreement where they'll shut down your API key - the best they can do is try
and blacklist your IP Address

~~~
mikeryan
See Craigslist vs 3taps. It's not clear if scraping is legal either.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc).

~~~
dreamsofdragons
Wow, google must be on some pretty shaky ground then...

~~~
comex
No, they're not. To quote from the linked Wikipedia article:

> the court held that sending a cease-and-desist letter and enacting an IP
> address block is sufficient notice of online trespassing, which a plaintiff
> can use to claim a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

If someone wants to block Google, they can simply add a robots.txt entry. An
IP block would work too. (Sending a cease-and-desist letter might or might not
also work, but it doesn't really matter - context and intent matters in court;
Google accepting the standard robots.txt as a 'go away' signal should be more
than sufficient.)

------
brador
What 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
This 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.

------
weberc2
I 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?

~~~
nl
They were planning too, but never actually did it.
[http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-
tw...](http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-twitter-
archive-119698.html)

------
0xmohit
This 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.)

------
zod50
I wonder how politwoops is allowed to function when postghost is deleted.

~~~
bnj
They 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

------
sergiotapia
What 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
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.

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
> _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...](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/)

And then there's this: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2016/06...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2016/06/17/trumps-meme-brigade-took-over-reddit-now-reddit-is-
trying-to-stop-them/)

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-
yo...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-your-dark-
secrets/)

~~~
rodgerd
> they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase.

Alienating racists, woman-haters, and pedophiles! Heavens, what an awful thing
to do!

~~~
sergiotapia
I imagine he was referring to normal people who wanted news about the Orlando
shooter but instead found thread after thread of [DELETED].

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

>Avoid gratuitous negativity.

~~~
kuschku
Have you seen the threads before the deletion? There was a huge brigade of
"DEPORT ISLAM" and "Yes all muslims" comments – over 90% of the comments were
that, and /r/the_donald ensured they would be constantly upvoted, too.

If such a thread happened here, you can be sure @dang would nuke them, too.

~~~
ominous
If you have a significant % of the population screaming X, you don't have a
problem. You have a population that believes in X.

of course,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\))
still apply.

What I am saying is, terribly as it may seem, hate can also be belief.

~~~
kuschku
Yes, but belief is not something that is supposed to be on that subreddit. The
subreddit is for a balanced discussion about news.

(And that belief is very similar to "The Third Wave" experiment – I recommend
reading the books or movies to try to understand the right-populist movement
in many countries today)

~~~
ominous
Thank you for the books, will look them up.

~~~
kuschku
It’s an experiment from the US from the 60s I think of a teacher trying to
understand how the general population could support the nazis – the events
really happened, but the book differs from the reality in most parts except
the ending, while the movie differs only in the ending, but there it’s very
different from what really happened.

After all, though, it’s well worth it, and should be standard material in all
schools.

If you want a more technical view, there’s also scientific writeups about "The
Third Wave".

------
poppppppppp123
What'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
Because it would still be against the Terms of Service and you still could get
very much sued.

~~~
bnj
IANAL 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
As 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.

------
asimuvPR
Brings 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
Archive projects usually listen to robots.txt

~~~
unimpressive
ArchiveTeam 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.

------
notimetorelax
PostGhost 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.

------
lcnmrn
Maybe it’s time to give Sublevel a new try. It’s not perfect, but it’s orders
of magnitude faster than Twitter.

~~~
omni
Your 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.

