Hours of free fun with Politwoops. Politwoops is a site funded by the US-based government accountability watchdog, the Sunlight Foundation. The site tracks and archives the deleted Tweets of hundreds of politicians and their staffers.
Since 2012 Twitter allowed Politwoops to use code to mine and archive these Tweets. For whatever reason(s) Twitter cutoff access in June 2015. Now Twitter has reversed itself so it’s back. All that’s available at this point are the older archives. There’s no info on when they’ll start mining current tweets.
Controversial comments, gaffes, just plain duh – Celebrate our elected officials by reading tweets they deleted seconds after posting them. Here.
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Twitter announced about Politwoops:
Today we’re pleased to announce that we have come to an agreement with The Sunlight Foundation and The Open State Foundation around Politwoops.
- “Politwoops is an important tool for holding our public officials, including candidates and elected or appointed public officials, accountable for the statements they make, and we’re glad that we’ve been able to reach an agreement with Twitter to bring it back online both in the US and internationally.” —Jenn Topper, communications director for The Sunlight Foundation
- “This agreement is great news for those who believe that the world needs more transparency. Our next step is now to continue and expand our work to enable the public to hold public officials accountable for their public statements.” —Arjan El Fassed, director of Open State Foundation, that launched Politwoops in more than 30 countries since 2010.
- “In many parts of the world Twitter is a central component of the public record. Re-establishing a mechanism to record, store and publish deleted tweets of politicians and public officials further demonstrates Twitter’s commitment to transparency and political accountability. As Twitter becomes a more important platform for political discourse, it is essential that politicians and public official’s tweets remain online and accessible to the general public. This announcement is an important step forward.” —Brett Solomon, executive director of the global digital rights organization Access Now
We look forward to continuing our work with these important organizations, and using Twitter to bring more transparency to public dialogue.
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