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Comment by rads | Hacker News Reader

If @realDonaldTrump deletes a tweet, it's against the Twitter ToS to republish it using a bot.

When it does happen I've seen people post screenshots of the old tweet. This doesn't prove anything more than trivial knowledge of the Chrome Web Inspector.

I've thought about distributing a program so people can keep their own local archives of important tweets. There are plenty of ways to achieve this already, but that's besides my point.

How can we make it obvious when an important figure deletes a tweet without breaking Twitter's ToS?

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I've found the answer to my own question:

https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/user/realDonaldTr...

Back story:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/u-s-version-of-politwoops-...

Twitter can falsify tweets too. At the bottom of it all, all anyone has is their own memories and records (both can be tampered!) and whatever trust they place in other people's records. That's the history of "escrow".

> doesn't prove anything more than trivial knowledge of the Chrome Web Inspector

That might be generous. They could have used Photoshop as well and had no technical knowledge at all.

Inspector makes it practically impossible to prove wrong. You literally cannot get the font, positioning, kerning, or spacing wrong with the replaced text.

Don't use Twitter to publish that information?

The issue is with consuming the tweets. Publishing the data somewhere else has the same problems as publishing on Twitter.

1. The Twitter ToS prevents scraping the content in section 4.iii.

https://twitter.com/tos?lang=en

2. If you use the API instead, they have this rule:

> Only surface Twitter activity as it surfaced on Twitter. For example, your Service should execute the unlike and delete actions by removing all relevant Content, not by publicly displaying to other users that the Tweet is no longer liked or has been deleted.

https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/agreement-and-policy#...

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