Twitter has been shutting down API access to clients that don't honor deletions for years now. I don't know why this is news. Note: somehow deleted tweets get covered anyway. If someone is sufficiently public of a figure, Twitter's policy doesn't save them from being publicly shamed when they tweet something the world doesn't approve of.<p>In fact you could easily argue that European law <i>requires</i> Twitter to disable this access. If I want to delete my online presence, surely being able to actually delete my tweets is as important as being able to delete things from the Google-cache.
Why doesn't PostGhost just record tweets using the browser? I'm sure it can be done without much problem. This is blatant abuse by Twitter. Public tweets are public, and the readers should be able to record/screenshot/save them, without Twitter having a say in the matter.<p>If they don't allow using the API for that, use the browser directly.
What about a browser plugin where users could click and it takes a copy from their screen of the tweet they're seeing and sends it to the a project?<p>Having multiple users send in the same tweet could count as additional validation that it was not edited.
I thought the Library of Congress was archiving all tweets? Perhaps I'm mistaken, or perhaps they do archive all tweets, but this archive isn't available via API such that PostGhost could rely on it? Or perhaps deleted tweets are also deleted from the LoC archive?
This is what I make of the situation:<p>- Foo tweets<p>- Bar takes a snapshot of Foo's tweet<p>- Foo deletes tweet<p>- Bar displays Foo's deleted tweet on own website<p>Twitter tells Bar to shut up.<p>(Twitter would, however, continue to store the deleted tweet. It wouldn't display it, though.)
What is this trend with Reddit, Twitter and Facebook suddenly going full gestapo and [REDACTED] everything? These kind of services are very important and if the companies don't want to play ball, then they should be circumvented to preserve the record.
What's the purpose of going through the API? Why wouldn't someone just set up crawlers for public figures in countries outside of jurisdiction.<p>To be clear I'm not promoting that somebody do this, just wondering why there may not be a viable alternative that does it this way.
Brings some questions into my mind:<p>Can the archive project or similar crawl twitter to save content?<p>What kind of checks and balances should social media networks have? Supone they be regulated?