After a Decade of Tracking Politicians’ Deleted Tweets,...

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After a Decade of Tracking Politicians’ Deleted Tweets, Politwoops Is No More
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Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, it has disabled the function we used to track the deleted Tweets of elected officials and political candidates — and the new method that Twitter says should identify deleted tweets appears to be broken.

Regardless of one's feelings about Twitter, this is a loss for transparency.

Thanks to @derekwillis for coming back to write this obit.

https://www.propublica.org/article/politwoops-deleted-tweets-twitter-politicians-musk

Like 24 Feb 2023 at 16:55 | Open on newsie.social

21 comments

William B. Turner

@ProPublica @derekwillis. That is bad news.

24 Feb 2023 at 16:57 | Open on newsie.social

Beth

@ProPublica @derekwillis

Twitter is broken. Literally many times, and figuratively all of the time.

24 Feb 2023 at 18:08 | Open on sfba.social

DB Schwein

@ProPublica @derekwillis
Since the courts verified that tweets are public record for officials I feel like that might also be illegal, but IANAL

24 Feb 2023 at 18:11 | Open on mas.to

Derek Willis

@deirdrebeth @ProPublica It's not illegal - Twitter isn't fully government speech, despite what some courts have held.

24 Feb 2023 at 18:34 | Open on newsie.social

Rhombus Ticks

@derekwillis @deirdrebeth @ProPublica It is immoral and what is legal in any system that allows the roberts rape court or desantis is questionable

What is legal is what the fascists can get away with

24 Feb 2023 at 19:38 | Open on universeodon.com

DB Schwein

@derekwillis @ProPublica
If you post as John Smith, no. If you post as "Senator from Idaho", it is. That's what the courts said. If you want the caché of posting under your job title you have the responsibilities too. Just like posting sexist, racist, fascist shit as "CEO of Whatsit" loses you a job.

25 Feb 2023 at 4:12 | Open on mas.to

Bc Clarity Carlton-Martin

@ProPublica @derekwillis cataracts for the too-transparent-for-me crowd #NFB #NoSeeUms #BornAgain

24 Feb 2023 at 19:04 | Open on c.im

Adam John

@ProPublica @derekwillis ... this is (1/1000) reasons why Mastodon and the #opensource Social Movement is so important today - support your communities online and support the move to #opensource in any way you can ...!

24 Feb 2023 at 19:07 | Open on mysocial.community

DELETED

@ProPublica @derekwillis
I don't understand how such an automated archie tool is depending on a twitter api. Should be possibly to archive with wget and check for deletions and changes in the text with diff tools.

24 Feb 2023 at 19:37 | Open on mastodon.online

Derek Willis

@pieselpriemel @ProPublica The API is by far the easiest way to do this, and the problem is one of scale. The way you suggest might work if we knew exactly when thousands of accounts tweeted and could afford to engage in massive numbers of requests and if the service was reliable. Believe me, I've explored other options.

24 Feb 2023 at 19:41 | Open on newsie.social

DELETED

@derekwillis @ProPublica Fair point. wget has to call every single tweet constantly to see if it gets deleted. Let's hope twitter fix their new methode, should be in their own intresst that fake screenshots can be identified. But I have little to no hope for that platform.

24 Feb 2023 at 19:56 | Open on mastodon.online

gavinisdie :troll:

@ProPublica @derekwillis the broken thing will never be fixed, too rich to afford to fix a platform

24 Feb 2023 at 20:52 | Open on masto.ai

Rick :swift: 6x💉😷🇺🇦

@ProPublica @derekwillis I feel like it should be possible to build a o tool to do this

24 Feb 2023 at 21:23 | Open on geekstodon.com

Derek Willis

@JetForMe @ProPublica it is possible; the problems are scale (thousands of accounts to track) and timeliness. And, not insignificantly, cost. Twitter could just run this themselves, tbh, but I understand why they don't.

24 Feb 2023 at 21:25 | Open on newsie.social

Rick :swift: 6x💉😷🇺🇦

@derekwillis @ProPublica 10k accounts, 10 tweets/day, 100k tweets/day, what, 1k of data per tweet, less than 500 GB over 10 years, I feel like it wouldn't more than $100/mo in cloud services, would it? I don't have any sense of the budget available for something like this, though.

24 Feb 2023 at 21:30 | Open on geekstodon.com

Derek Willis

@JetForMe @ProPublica it's complicated, Politwoops relies on the streaming API, which means it has to run 24/7, because in order to know which tweets have been deleted you have to have copies of them first (the notification is just the ID).

That latter bit is what's currently broken - Twitter isn't sending those notifications. So we would have to, I guess, go back and check if tweets had been deleted, which is possible but you lose time context.

Also, ppl delete stuff after a long time.

24 Feb 2023 at 21:33 | Open on newsie.social

Derek Willis

@JetForMe @ProPublica So you could build a system that does all of that, absent the timeliness factor, but it would be difficult to say that you'd be capturing all of the deletions.