Post Ghost Shutdown: An Open Letter to Twitter

[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?

[ominous]

"delete my tweets".

Would you say a Major Influencer owns his public presence? Does Donald Trump own his words? Does J. K. Rowling? (as per the examples given in the letter). I honestly don't know.

We hope you’ll consider the fact that as Twitter has become a dominant platform of communication, verified users with huge follower bases influence the public dialog as much as elected officials, and should be accountable for their public statements on Twitter just as they are for public statements they make anywhere else.

I find it hard to believe that people agree with a Developer Agreement and Policy such as Twitter's. Do you? An 'agreement' orders you to delete content because it says so, and you agree with it? What if I use the API to flag content I want, then wget the relevant html. Would an API agreement have any say in that? Must all screenshots of deleted tweets be deleted? Articles about deleted tweets? Are the original tweeters forced to deny having tweeted what they did, unless Twitter undeleted theirs tweets? Even if taken to court?

Sir, did you, or did you not, tweet that you want to acquire jell-o and take a bath in it

Well, just check the API. It says I didn't tweet such thing

Case closed

Should I tweet my orders to my army of nuclear powered androids, and then delete it, so that no proof exists?

Furthermore, the API exists in the world. The deleted tweet is a detail of the API and of the twitter infrastructure, that allows deletion. However, the fact that a specific tweet was deleted does not belong to the API, but to the meatspace. Are we to deny that a tweet was deleted? More than that, are we to deny that a specific tweet was sent at a specific date?

Maybe the question really is, can a Developer Agreement and Policy change the world?

How is this enforceable? It is new both because of Politifacts existence, and because we are letting an API agreement apply where it does not belong.

[tremon]

In fact you could easily argue that European law requires Twitter to disable this access

But you'd be wrong. The right to be forgotten does not apply to public figures making political statements.

[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.

[jonknee]

Copyright issues don't go away if you capture via browser.

[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...

[roywiggins]

In theory yes, in practice no.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-tw...

[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

[aaronbrethorst]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/technology/twitter-politwo...

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[zouhair]

That's some crappy name.