Twitter blocks API access for Diplotwoops website

Open State Foundation Director Arjan El Fassed wrote in a statement that “What elected politicians publicly say is a matter of public record”.

Twitter’s famously propped itself up as a supporter of transparency and free speech.

“Ultimately, Twitter‘s decision was guided by the company’s core value to Defend and respect the user’s voice”.

Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) has shut off access to 30 more dedicated accounts to monitor and archive the deleted tweets of politicians, diplomats and embassies around the world.

This is a bad precedent, even if it’s not surprising. Diplotwoops and Politwoops are the two agencies responsible with revealing all the deleted comments and statements of politicians.

Of course, there is a difference between the Washington Post trying to retrieve a physical object and Twitter cutting off access to its service. If the ability to preserve their tweets is lost, Twitter becomes just a one-way tool. But according to OSF, Twitter cut off the API access for those remaining sites.

The President of Sunlight Foundation Chris Gates condemned Twitter’s decision.

It said it only recently discovered the sites that tracked the deleted messages, and moved to rein them in, saying they were breaking the rules by using a tool that identified deleted messages and highlighting them.

It’s easy to indict the effects of capitalism on public welfare, but Silicon Valley’s inexorable need to monetize everything might not be the real issue here.

And without missing a beat, people took to Twitter to complain about this announcement.

Is this really a good thing, we wonder? “And even in the case of deleted tweets, it’s also a public part – these tweets are live and viewable by anyone on Twitter.com and other platforms for at least some amount of time”, said the siterunner, Sunlight Foundation, at the time.

A spokesman told Channel 2’s Justin Gray “the ability to delete one’s tweets for whatever reason has been a long-standing feature of Twitter for all users”.

For its part, Twitter says it’s merely trying to protect its users.

Advocates of political transparency organizations argue that tracking and archiving the deleted tweets is in the best interest of the public and that politicians should be regarded in a different manner than everyday users. Why would Twitter need to verify the identity of only some individuals if their words were not more important than others by some measure?