See here
I legitimately adore Twitter. But I think shutting off automated back-ups of politician tweets is a giant mistake. http://t.co/lA63a3cVqO
— Philip Bump (@pbump) August 24, 2015
and here
This is well-said, and I hope that @jack & the @policy team read it. https://t.co/xGjvnylC7T
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) August 25, 2015
…for details. Anyway: Twitter almost certainly values having politicians on Twitter more than it values holding those politicians accountable for what they say on Twitter. Therefore, Twitter will do little things to please its politician-tweeters. Not archiving their Tweets is a very nice ‘little thing’ for Twitter to do.
And that’s the way it is.
Moe Lane
Hmmm. A quick “follow-and-record” app, with storage in a de-duplicated cloud…
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Mew
Yup. This will be trivial to overcome. If I can see it, I can archive it. I don’t need to use their API to do so.
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The only problem is that doing so will almost certainly break twitter’s terms of service.
And that means there’s one free hit *per monitor-bot*… and more whack-a-mole.
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It’s a bad idea on Twitter’s part, unless they’ve monetized stupid, of course.
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Mew
Won’t work on their part, because a monitor-bot is going to look exactly like any other twitter client. In particular, it won’t require polling at any high rate of frequency.
They can attempt to play whack-a-mole, but once the data escapes twitter’s servers they simply cannot control where it goes and stays.
Precisely.
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There are already monitor-bots – “X followed and Y un-followed, monitored by [whatever]” for just one.
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I suspect, therefore, that Twitter think they can “monetize stupid”, i.e. they can extract something of value *to them* from the political class in exchange for this nothing.
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Mew