Toulouse networks

Le site qui archive les tweets supprimés des politiques pourra refonctionner annonce le réseau social.

Politwoops revient. Le site qui archivait les tweets des personnalités politiques, même ceux effacés, avait vu son fonctionnement chahuté après que Twitter lui a coupé l'accès en août dernier. En effet, conserver des tweets supprimés est contraire à la charte d'utilisation du réseau social.

Branle-bas de combat, mobilisation... Twitter étant devenu un média important de la parole publique, il n'était pas forcément normal que les politiques puissent balayer d'un clic toutes leurs prises de parole publique. Ou en tout cas, il est normal que des citoyens puissent les conserver malgré la disparition.

Cinq mois plus tard, le 31 décembre, Twitter a annoncé rétablir ses services pour Politwoops. Jack Dorsey, le patron du réseau social, s'était déjà excusé en octobre : «Nous avons la responsabilité d'accompagner les associations qui apportent plus de transparence dans le débat public, comme Politwoops le faisait.» En 2016 donc, les tweets supprimés des personnalités publiques pourront à nouveau être conservés.

«Cet accord est une bonne nouvelle pour ceux qui pensent que le monde a besoin de plus de transparence», salue le directeur de l'Open State Foundation qui avait ouvert les déclinaisons mondiales de Politwoops, dans un communiqué publié par Twitter.

Retrouvez cet article sur Liberation.fr

The logo from Politwoops, with a strikethrough. (Sunlight Foundation, Washington Post)

The reason Anthony Weiner is no longer a member of Congress is because he sent a photograph of himself in his underwear to someone on Twitter. The reason that Aaron Schock is no longer a member of Congress appears to be because of a discrepancy between the number of miles for which he billed the government and the number of miles he actually drove. But he was under scrutiny in part thanks to the revelation that he'd flown around the world on donors' planes -- information uncovered in part by examining his Instagram feed.

Social media is often dumb, trite and useless, much like the things we say out loud and the things we do in-person. But on rare occasions, something important and revelatory can happen -- if we notice it.

Gawker reported Wednesday evening that Twitter pulled the plug on Politwoops, a site created by the Sunlight Foundation to track things that American politicians had tweeted and then deleted. Often what Politwoops captured were deleted typos or accidental re-tweets. On occasion, it was something more intriguing.

Last summer, for example, Politwoops automatically logged politicians deleting tweets of praise about Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier held hostage in Afghanistan. After his negotiated release, questions arose about Bergdahl's disappearance which cast him in a different political light. (Earlier this year, he was charged with desertion.) Without Politwoops, this bit of whitewashing might have gone unnoticed, given that many of the tweets were days old.

To capture these tweets, Politwoops relied on Twitter's application program interface, a sort of socket for programmers to use to run automated tools. In this case, Politwoops would catalog new tweets from politicians, and, if one was deleted, publish it. Human involvement was minimal.

"[P]reserving deleted Tweets violates our developer agreement," Twitter told Gawker, explaining why Politwoops was no longer working. "Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress." In other words, Twitter had a rule, and Politwoops broke it.