Shutting down a transparency tool in 29 countries? Twitter can do better:
Last week, Twitter shut down a tool that helps people hold politicians accountable in 29 countries around the world. The Netherlands-based civil society group Open State Foundation created Politwoops, which scans the Twitter accounts of politicians for tweets they’ve deleted. Deleted tweets can provide insight to the viewpoints of public officials, and journalists have been using Politwoops to keep representatives accountable for what they say publicly. In the spirit of transparency, Open State allowed other organizations to use the code of the tool, and use it they have, everywhere from Argentina, to Turkey, to Spain, to the United Kingdom. But on August 21, Twitter turned it off.
Twitter informed Politwoops that it was violating the terms of its Application Programming Interface, or API. Three months earlier, Twitter decided to stop letting the Sunlight Foundation, a U.S. transparency organization, use the tool. To justify that decision, Twitter explained that “No one user is more deserving of that ability [to delete a tweet] than another. Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of one’s voice.”
Source: accessnow.org
