
Twitter shuts down 30 sites dedicated to saving politicians' deleted tweets - 650REDHAIR
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9196969/twitter-shuts-down-politwoops-diplotwoops/
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kazinator
> _" Imagine how nerve-racking — terrifying, even — tweeting would be if it
> was immutable and irrevocable?"_

Yes, it would be like these ... um ... thingies that Twits never heard of
like, oh, e-mail and Usenet.

And older thingies like writing letters. And, for example, having a "letter to
the editor" published in a newspaper, which is then archived in a library.

Publishing _should_ be nerve-wracking and terrifying.

You know, you can still buy calendars filled with George W. Bush gaffes.
Should those be cease-and-desisted?

~~~
nailer
Which are both a lot less interesting than Twitter.

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kazinator
If your e-mail is less interesting than Twitter, that really only speaks to
the quality of your contacts.

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nailer
My comment comes from a simple observation that globally significant breaking
news (that one isn't personally involved in) tends to happen on Twitter rather
than people's inboxes. But thanks for the snide remark.

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ohitsdom
Wow, what a short-sighted and ill-conceived move on Twitter's part. I know the
answer but I still have to ask- has Twitter used the internet before? Don't
they know how it works?

The first thing many people do when they see a controversial tweet (especially
from someone well known) is to take a screenshot. This changes nothing.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
What is appalling to me is that this illustrates how completely out of touch
the Twitter management is with their user base.

~~~
tptacek
I simply disagree.

Many of these sites didn't originally spring up to serve the public interest.
They're an offspring of something that started a couple years ago: Twitter
bots that scrape for _anyone 's_ deleted messages and then highlight them.

Those services are extremely toxic. They meant that as friends of mine joined
the service I'd have to warn them: don't delete things on Twitter, because
there are asshole bots that will use deleted messages to fuck with you.

The public interest implications of some of these new political Twitter
services are more straightforward, but that doesn't mean it's Twitter's
obligation to sacrifice user experience for what is probably a marginal public
interest benefit. Twitter is legitimately caught between the public interest
and their own interests, and I'd have trouble blaming them either way.

Why do I think the public interest implications here are marginal? A bunch of
reasons:

* Politicians are quickly going to learn how hostile Twitter is, and assign professional spindroids to their accounts (or to filter the messages that they themselves post).

* It's not like Twitter can prevent deleted tweets from leaking. They'll get screenshot anyways. This just keeps the delete-shaming phenomenon from being shoved in everyone's face.

On a previous thread about Twitter, someone pointed out that Twitter shouldn't
do this because they should behave like infrastructure. But Twitter doesn't
want to be infrastructure; the infrastructure market position is very bad for
them.

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slg
Observing user requests (including deletes) has been a requirement of the API
for as long time. The only thing that I'm surprised by is that it took Twitter
this long to crack down. This doesn't mean these Tweets from public officials
shouldn't or can't be preserved, it just means that doing so in this manner
was always a misuse of Twitter's API.

~~~
eli
Out of curiosity, what manner of saving them would you suggest instead? I'm
not sure it's possible in an automated way without technically violating their
TOS.

~~~
leni536
Couldn't one just scrape? You don't have to use the API.

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jc4p
> without technically violating their TOS.

Scraping is against most sites (and Twitter)'s ToS.

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leni536
(I'm not a lawyer, IANAL) I don't get this. When did I officially agree to
their ToS? I automatically agree on the first HTTP request? I think if I never
had an account or never requested an API key then I didn't agree to it. Having
said that there could be other legal issues to scraping (like copyright of
posted tweets), but maybe ToS is not one of them.

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orbitingpluto
Think back thirty years. Imagine if ABC or CBS could demand that the New York
Times not publish statements made by a politician on the nightly news or
aggregate information about the political stances of a representative.

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chjohasbrouck
That's not what Twitter is doing. If that was their goal they'd be suing
Gawker and TMZ.

The point isn't to stop deleted tweets from being disseminated at all - that's
impossible and I'm sure they're smart enough to know that.

The sole purpose of sites like Politwoops was to undo a feature of Twitter's
product. Not only that, but they were using Twitter's own API to accomplish
that. Twitter's goal is to set the precedent that that's not ok.

~~~
orbitingpluto
Again, think back thirty years to a scenario where a politician misspeaks on
the news. No network would ever deny a request for a tape or transcript of a
news program based solely whether the politician wants his statement to
disappear. Everyone will agree that scraping and highlighting all deleted
tweets is distasteful and slimy, but we're talking about politicians here.
(Not that they're slimy, but that they exert an undue amount of power over the
average bloke. Public interest, democracy, and all that.)

~~~
chjohasbrouck
The analogy doesn't really make sense to me. Twitter isn't a news service,
it's a communications platform, and Twitter users aren't necessarily
politicians.

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orbitingpluto
Twitter is a one to many communications platform, not a one to one platform.

The analogy holds because Twitter is 1:N, not 1:1. They are publishing
information to a large amount of people that people use to educate and inform
themselves.

And I already stated that doing this for every Twitter user is slimy. But
retaining the record of how a politician has communicated with the public?
That's in the public interest.

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sbecker
Anything you put on the internet is indeed immutable and irrevocable. This
comment included. Hell, you don't even need to hit "submit" \- the keystrokes
and mouse movements - they are all captured and piped to many different
analytics services in real time. It might not be surfaced on a publicly
accessible site, but rest assured, it's in a database somewhere.

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chjohasbrouck
If they wanted to create a general "politician public statement archive" that
included deleted tweets, I think that would be acceptable.

Where they cross the line is in only doing deleted tweets, and marketing
themselves that way. The entire purpose of their product is to undo a feature
of someone else's product.

This story is being framed a certain way: "Twitter is a big corporation
attacking the little guy in defense of evil politicians," and kids on Reddit
are outraged. I don't think that's what's happening here at all. They're just
defending the integrity of their product.

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dhimes
From TFA: _[The] decision was the result of "thoughtful internal deliberation
and close consideration of a number of factors" ..._

They should address this truthfully on their blog. Letting something like this
twist in the wind while their base users go apeshit is a surprising decision.
They did this on a Friday- they've had all weekend to craft a statement.

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gorena
What stops the sites from just creating another API key (and call it something
obfuscated if they were using something obvious before).

Or, just run strings on the Twitter iOS app bundle... or just look at traffic
in Charles...

~~~
nailer
Nothing, but breaking the ToS means they'll always be shut down before they
can become big.

~~~
user_0001
I haven't read the story or followed it all.

But I create API key for site: xyz.com where I use the stream API to get all
tweets from users a-z

Then I push those to site zyx.com

There is no way for twitter to know what API generated those tweets.
Especially if site xyz.com DOES obey the delete notifications (which also
triggers site zyx.com to go into action in checking the deleted tweet)

I don't see how this is a total non-story

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empressplay
These guys just need to build an http scraper, they'll be back

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eli
I doubt it, that could be costly if Twitter decides to pursue them:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc).

~~~
Nadya
The heart of that case is the cease & desist letter being treated as denying
authorization.

On another note, I wonder how strongly this would hold up against an
individual. e.g. suing someone that was permbanned from your site because they
used a proxy to access the site

Beyond being difficult to find/sue the individual - and it being well beyond
worth the costs of the lawsuit itself - I wonder if it would hold up in court.

I'll keep this bookmarked as a (rather empty) threat against trolls who are
ban evading.

~~~
eli
Revoking an API key seems like a pretty clear sign you are denying
authorization.

~~~
Nadya
Denying authorization of the API, not of the website.

Important difference.

Especially given someone who uses web scraping doesn't necessarily mean they
attempted to use the API, had an API key, or ever had the possibility of said
non-existent API key being revoked.

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nathanvanfleet
That's pretty sad. I imagine there are plenty of API users that are doing
actual nefarious things. This only comes of as being a back-bench political
deal that Twitter made.

~~~
ante_annum

        back-bench political deal
    

Or just enforcing a ToS they've had in place for a while.

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dudul
I'm still trying to get over the fact that politicians actually use twitter to
discuss politics and convey their message.

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wutbrodo
That's always been the mystery of Twitter to me. The fact that it became a
place where interesting people have (ostensibly) serious conversations is
_incredible_ to me, given how amazingly ill-suited to that task it is. If it
was just as successful but (only) full of people exhibiting drive-by "wit", it
would make a lot more sense to me.

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embiggen
API not working for OSF anymore due to political reasons?

There is need .. stealthy and robust .. tweet scraper.

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Mithaldu
Earlier:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106882)

Nothing new in this link.

~~~
650REDHAIR
I reposted so that people who don't surf HN on Sunday still get a chance to
see.

~~~
Mithaldu
Worthwhile to make that the first comment on a repost then. ;)

