January 30, 2024
Nothing that’s said on the Internet ever truly disappears, and that can be a good or bad thing depending on the situation. One example of this being a good thing is that whenever a politicians decides to tweet something without thinking it all the way through, thus giving us a look at their true colors, that tweet is forever accessible by the public. Even when those tweets are deleted, organizations like the The Open State Foundation are always saving them so that people can still view them, but that’s not going to happen anymore thanks to some new Twitter policies.
The executives who once called Twitter the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party” don’t work at Twitter anymore. It shows. In June, Twitter abruptly cut off access to Politwoops, a website operated by the Sunlight Foundation that preserved deleted tweets sent by elected officials in the United States. Then last weekend, Twitter dropped the hammer on Politwoops’ sister services, cutting off access to Diplotwoops and Politwoops in 30 countries around the globe. In doing so, Twitter shut down dozens of popular services that enabled the public to see what diplomats, legislators, mayors, governors, presidents and other elected officials (or, in most cases, their staff) once had tweeted but then decided to delete, thus removing a layer of accountability for public speech. As author Rebecca MacKinnon wrote about in her seminal book about democracy in the age of the Internet, Consent of the Networked, we’re now living in an era in which much public speech is hosted on private platforms. Corporations own the social media networks, cable companies, radio and television stations, newspapers and online outlets (including The Huffington Post) that relay government officials’ proclamations to the general public.
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