> The implication that tweets - and by extension, history - should be mutable feels like 1984.
You've pointed out the problem: people in a democracy need access to the truest history possible; mutable history is a slippery slope.
But I disagree with
> Then don't tweet dumb stuff?
The challenges we're facing are new, and need new solutions. Political entities are acting on incomplete information and perspective; inevitably, they'll tweet dumb stuff (like I and many on HN have). I'm not saying that they should be able to delete tweets, I'm saying that politicians haven't had this ability before. Now that they have it, we (the democracy) have to decide what to do about it. "Don't tweet dumb stuff" is impractical and simplistic (sorry!).
Considering a democratic populace wants from its leaders intelligence, strategy, and (at least in the US) authenticity, American leaders will be struggling with a tension between authenticity and advertisement. This struggle leads to the deleting of tweets. I don't know the solution; knowing the solution is a different matter.
You can stop reading your comment after the first three words for the real lesson. Politicians will just pay anodyne spokedroids to manage their accounts for them.
Politwoops could circumvent this problem by just not publishing the tweets to twitter. They could just put them on a website, and maybe even aggregate the politicians other communications. No?
Though generally I feel that anyone at all being judged on an instant 140 character message is pretty sad state of affairs. Meaningful debate (political and otherwise) with evidence based arguments and so on seems like a naive fantasy these days.
If you've ever worked with Twitter's API, you should know that not honoring deletes on your app is against the TOS. It doesn't matter what accounts are being monitored, when a tweet is deleted by the account, you have to delete it from your server.
Detecting another liar politician supersedes any API policy. You can also say that Snowden leaks are against the law but the importance of his relevations makes arguing about a ToS or law very naive.
They'll likely hit $3.5 billion in annual revenue within two years. One year after that, they'll be the size of Yahoo (which is 12 years older than Twitter). They're already on a revenue ramp dramatically better than the one Netflix has had.
If that isn't a model that works, I can't wait to see the one that does.
Twitter's primary financial problem is an unnecessarily bloated cost structure.
They spend a ton on data centers and talent. Last quarter there was no user growth and profit per share was 7 cents. Shareholders definitely don't agree with you about this.
Yahoo is one of the largest consumer tech companies on earth with $4.6 billion in sales. Yahoo's problem isn't their size today, it's their lack of sales growth for ten years. Twitter doesn't have a lack of sales growth.
What's not to agree with exactly? The fact is they grew sales 61% - with zero user growth. For a company that large to be growing that fast, they're very clearly having no problems with growing the business.
They need 47% growth in the next four quarters, and then 36% growth in the four quarters after that, to hit $3.5 billion in sales. Given first quarter growth was 74%, then second quarter growth was 61%, it's not a far stretch to hit 47% over the next four.
Shareholders have sent the stock down on the basis of user growth, not sales growth.
Twitter has three problems.
1) They're not Facebook, it is not about users, and they should stop trying to be something other than a broadcast platform. It's about consumption.
2) They were extremely overvalued right out of the gate. There was a lot of delusional thinking around their potential. There's one Facebook, there isn't going to be another any time soon. Twitter will never be another Google type company.
3) They're carrying vastly more cost in their business than they need to. They have 36% the head count of Facebook, with 12% of the sales. They've stacked the business on the premise they were going to be a massive company like Facebook - they're not, it's time to adjust costs accordingly.
> was extensively used by the media to investigate instances of deception, corruption and ineptitude.
Because getting an intern to hack up a 5 minute Python script to do the same is too much effort? OK maintaining a list of current politicians current Twitter accounts is probably where the work is, but if you are interested in a number of prominent accounts this is not that hard a task.
It's a perl script that can hook into Twitter stream API. Sign up for an account, create an access token for ttytter, start subscribing to politicians, and it will suck down every tweet they make in realtime as they make them. If they make a tweet and delete it 30 seconds later, you'll have captured it. That is why whining about deletability of tweets is pointless, anybody with entry-level Linux skills can monitor thousands of politicians.
It can be easily done; but I think the problem here is that if you're using the Twitter API (as is the case with the link you mentioned), you are required to honor deletion requests. If you don't, then your access is revoked, which is what happened in this case.
Now, you could just archive the tweets internally and reveal them under some other name...
The choke point seemed to me to be that they end up notifying you of it via...twitter. You can go to their site and still see deleted tweets. If you weren't putting them back up on Twitter, you could easily monitor politician tweets and never get caught by Twitter.
How do archive sites and sites like Storify get away with storing deleted tweets? Storify even lets you repost your stories on Twitter.
Then again, with the thousands, if not tens of thousands of oauth credentials checked in on public github repos, I don't really see that revoking access to one credential as a major bottle neck.
The twitter api allows to get a feed per author name, so if you have a list of users, that's pretty easy. All you need to do is use a basic http client lib in your prefered language to do the http query and then some basic html css skills to show the result there :)
I can't blame them. These things are incredibly toxic to the Twitter community. Already, you have to warn everyone who joins the site not to delete anything because people run services that highlight things that get deleted.
I mean that descriptively, not normatively. I mean: no matter how you slice the public interest, these things are clearly harmful to Twitter itself.
Obviously, blocking them doesn't actually help the situation; once you publish something on the Internet, it's out there, and people can come up with 100 different ways to get around Twitter's restrictions.
I don't believe repeating this viewpoint is useful. It is a kneejerk reaction that in my opinion fails to take the actual situation into account.
This wasn't a service monitoring everyone, this was a service monitoring elected officials, whose statements, whatever they are, are part of the public record. This is especially important as particularly politicians derive a lot of their power from what they say (and often promise) to their constituents, regardless of whether they actually stick to what they say or not.
While I personally feel that Twitter taking down this service is a shame, and yet another sign of how reliance on these private companies for expression of free speech is never going to work, tptacek is right. When it comes down to it, Twitter as a private company is completely allowed to do this, and in fact it is in their interest to do so; these services harm Twitter as a whole, despite being (in my opinion) a net good for society. Of course Twitter would act in it's own interests here.
Calling someone else's viepoint not useful is itself counterproductive and not useful. Twitter doesn't in of itself owe anything to the public interest. It's a company; it needs to make money. It isn't funded by the government.
