Oops! Now You Can Track the Tweets Politicians Tried to Delete
Remember that time John McCain mocked "Vlad" Putin? So does the Internet.
Publication: The Atlantic
Megan Garber
May 30, 2012
Half an hour after posting his message, however, Fincher deleted it -- thus depriving the world not only of an opportunity for comparative textual analysis, but also for conversational interaction with a politician. Post, think better of it, delete. That might have been the end of things. A small insight into a politician (or, at least, into the staffer of a politician) lost to history.
Until now, that is. Today, the transparency-minded folks over at the Sunlight Foundation are releasing a new service: Politwoops, which exists solely to resurface deleted tweets from politicians' accounts. The project follows the official Twitter feeds of, among others, President Obama, members of Congress, and presidential candidates; when a pol has a deleted a tweet, Politwoops records the deletion and archives the message.
