show all tweets for deleted accounts?

[edsu]

A friend of mine (@dchud) has recently noticed that some Twitter accounts for members of Congress have started to be deleted. https://twitter.com/dchud/status/286494761051889664

For example:

• petestark
• SenBenNelson
• RepTimHolden
• RepRickBerg
• RepNormDicks
• RepMarkCritz
• RepLynnWoolsey
• RepJJJr
• DennyRehberg
• CongBobFilner

It's great that you can still visit http://politwoops.sunlightfoundation.com/user/petestark but you only see the individual tweet he deleted. Now that his account is deleted does it make sense to show all of the tweets that you have archived?

Thanks for a great service by the way.

[kaitlin]

Ed-

I'm one of the developers on Politwoops, but the response below comes from the communications lead on the project, Nicko Margolies (no github account). You can reach him at nmargolies@sunlightfoundation.com if you want to talk further. Thanks!

Hi Ed,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention and for thinking of Politwoops! As the old Congress exits and the new Congress arrives there is a lot of Twitter turnover. When we originally launched Politwoops we surfaced every deletion automatically, but this quickly raised the ire of Twitter as it violated their API Terms of Service. We chatted back and forth with Twitter and made an agreement as of June 22nd, 2012 where we review and approve any deletions that are shown on the site. The agreement essentially says that we can only surface tweets that were specifically and actively deleted by the user and are not minor issues like fixed typos, wrong twitter handles or incorrect links.

The intention is to only surface significant messaging changes or tweets that never reappear in similar form. Hopefully this keeps the public deletions interesting as it's a less wild stream of typos. As part of this methodology we do not surface the tweets that show up as deletions when their entire account is removed as the user did not go through and actively hit delete on each tweet, they simply left the entire service. That said, we would love to continue this conversation so feel free to get in touch via email.

Sorry if this is a bit confusing, but honestly Politwoops has a hazy relationship with Twitter's Terms of Service and the project lives in constant fear of being shutdown. Thanks for getting in touch with Sunlight and for using Politwoops!

Nicko

[edsu]

It seems unfortunate that Nicko can't be bothered to create a Github account to comment on a ticket for a project that he is a lead on, and discuss it here. I'm not sure I understand the rational, and am not hopeful that discussing it in email will prove to be very fruitful. But thank you very much for following up. I completely understand the constraints that you are operating under, with Twitter's ToS hanging over your head like the Sword of Damocles. Keep up the good work!

[nickom]

Hi Ed,

Apologies if my response via Kaitlin wasn't clear: I am happy to discuss this more! Thanks for giving me the nudge I needed to become a member of Github and I hope I can help answer any questions or concerns.

Best, Nicko

[kaitlin]

Welcome to Github Nicko!

[kaitlin]

Only the first time!

[edsu]

Thanks Nicko! So your position is that politwoops only displays messages that were not typos, and were intentionally deleted. I fail to see how deleting all the tweets falls under the category of deleting typos. I don't want to be pedantic here. If the reason not to display all the tweets is that you are worried what Twitter will think that's a good enough reason for me.

[nickom]

Hi Ed,

It's not only typos that aren't made public, it's also broken links, incorrect handles or tweets that show up as deleted by the user we follow when, in fact, they didn't hit the delete button for the specific tweet. It's that last category that we view account deletions.

Maybe an example of this situation will make a bit more sense: Politwoops is watching SenatorA's twitter account. If SenatorA retweets VoterA (who isn't followed by Politwoops) and then VoterA later deletes their tweet, Politwoops will tell us that SenatorA just deleted the tweet, even though SenatorA didn't go back and hit delete on that tweet. The deletion pops up in our system and a moderator goes to investigate and finds that SenatorA didn't actively delete the tweet so we don't make it public.

Sometimes we find that the original tweets by VoterA are still live and it WAS SenatorA who deleted it. This was the case a couple days ago when Senator John Thune decided to remove a number of retweets he had made and because the originals were still live, we knew that he actively hit delete on each one and so we made them public: http://politwoops.sunlightfoundation.com/user/SenJohnThune

Hope that helps clarify things and thanks for your interest in Politwoops!

Best, Nicko

[edsu]

Thanks for that example. I still fail to understand why deleting an account isn't viewed (by Politwoops) as actively deleting a tweet. If SenatorA deletes their account they are actively choosing to delete all their tweets, not just one. There is no VoterA that is deleting them.

[nickom]

Hi Ed,

As we continue to develop and improve on the project we'll keep this feedback in mind - thanks for getting in touch and sorry if my explanations didn't clear up all your questions.

Best, Nicko