Hacker News Reader

Comment by chjohasbrouck | Hacker News Reader

That's not what Twitter is doing. If that was their goal they'd be suing Gawker and TMZ.

The point isn't to stop deleted tweets from being disseminated at all - that's impossible and I'm sure they're smart enough to know that.

The sole purpose of sites like Politwoops was to undo a feature of Twitter's product. Not only that, but they were using Twitter's own API to accomplish that. Twitter's goal is to set the precedent that that's not ok.

View on HN

Again, think back thirty years to a scenario where a politician misspeaks on the news. No network would ever deny a request for a tape or transcript of a news program based solely whether the politician wants his statement to disappear. Everyone will agree that scraping and highlighting all deleted tweets is distasteful and slimy, but we're talking about politicians here. (Not that they're slimy, but that they exert an undue amount of power over the average bloke. Public interest, democracy, and all that.)

The analogy doesn't really make sense to me. Twitter isn't a news service, it's a communications platform, and Twitter users aren't necessarily politicians.

Twitter is a one to many communications platform, not a one to one platform.

The analogy holds because Twitter is 1:N, not 1:1. They are publishing information to a large amount of people that people use to educate and inform themselves.

And I already stated that doing this for every Twitter user is slimy. But retaining the record of how a politician has communicated with the public? That's in the public interest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com