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.
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.
