Post Ghost Shutdown: An Open Letter to Twitter
postghost.com
postghost.com
In fact you could easily argue that European law requires 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.
if you read the post by the company they clearly explain why this should be news. the fact that twitter allows at least one company to do this already IMO is enough to make ti news.
Why can Politwoops exist but not this site?
Would you say a Major Influencer owns his public presence? Does Donald Trump own his words? Does J. K. Rowling? (as per the examples given in the letter). I honestly don't know.
We hope you’ll consider the fact that as Twitter has become a dominant platform of communication, verified users with huge follower bases influence the public dialog as much as elected officials, and should be accountable for their public statements on Twitter just as they are for public statements they make anywhere else.
I find it hard to believe that people agree with a Developer Agreement and Policy such as Twitter's. Do you? An 'agreement' orders you to delete content because it says so, and you agree with it? What if I use the API to flag content I want, then wget the relevant html. Would an API agreement have any say in that? Must all screenshots of deleted tweets be deleted? Articles about deleted tweets? Are the original tweeters forced to deny having tweeted what they did, unless Twitter undeleted theirs tweets? Even if taken to court?
Sir, did you, or did you not, tweet that you want to acquire jell-o and take a bath in it
Well, just check the API. It says I didn't tweet such thing
Case closed
Should I tweet my orders to my army of nuclear powered androids, and then delete it, so that no proof exists?
Furthermore, the API exists in the world. The deleted tweet is a detail of the API and of the twitter infrastructure, that allows deletion. However, the fact that a specific tweet was deleted does not belong to the API, but to the meatspace. Are we to deny that a tweet was deleted? More than that, are we to deny that a specific tweet was sent at a specific date?
Maybe the question really is, can a Developer Agreement and Policy change the world?
How is this enforceable? It is new both because of Politifacts existence, and because we are letting an API agreement apply where it does not belong.
But you'd be wrong. The right to be forgotten does not apply to public figures making political statements.
If they don't allow using the API for that, use the browser directly.
This isn't a copyright issue at all; it's exclusively a ToS issue. Twitter can choose to prevent someone from using their API. They'd have a harder time forcing the takedown of the existing content.
As a user I think this is the right tack to take. There is no possible advantage for Twitter to have sites that make the delete feature not really work.
Then? No, this is about getting it through the API while it's still up.
That said, Twitter administers the checkmark in puzzling and thoroughly non-transparent ways.
That is in fact the only reason Verified Accounts exist, and is the reason that non-celebrities or people otherwise lacking notoriety can not get Verified Accounts. It's not worth Twitter's effort to make my account, or any random user, Verified, it seems. But as Twitter's role continues to expand in the public sphere, it is really the public who gives out Verified Accounts (through making someone famous), and the public should have requirements, such as a certain level of consistency, from the accounts it gives the power/influence of the Verified Account to.
In particular, "fair use" specifically doesn't require people to get permission from a copyright holder:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-u...
Discussing the tweets of public figures is clearly "commentary and criticism", which would give things like PostGhost "substantial non-infringing use" (which I believe is the relevant legal threshold).
How could this possibly be relevant? Copyright won't give them any grounds to stop you from saying "he's trying to walk it back now, but he said <embarrassing statement> earlier".
However, this would hinder the service, as with the polling model it may not always notice all the tweets.
Zing.
> the court held that sending a cease-and-desist letter and enacting an IP address block is sufficient notice of online trespassing, which a plaintiff can use to claim a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
If someone wants to block Google, they can simply add a robots.txt entry. An IP block would work too. (Sending a cease-and-desist letter might or might not also work, but it doesn't really matter - context and intent matters in court; Google accepting the standard robots.txt as a 'go away' signal should be more than sufficient.)
I wonder where that line is drawn. A person using their browser, clicking a link to load a web page initiates a hundred different automated routines[1]. Is that not automation? Is it then automation to have a click initiate another click or two more clicks? Where do you draw the line?
edit: the spirit of the rule is to grant Twitter control over when to apply the rule. Is that what you meant?
Is [F5] + [CTRL+S](for save) automated? Is a browser auto-refresh capability? is `$ watch wget` (or something to that effect) automated? getpocket.com? an IFTTT recipe? A crawler?
See what happens?
Automated means: without human intervention. So anything that accesses more than one URL without human intervention would violate the TOS.
I'm quite amazed that this would have to be spelled out. If you're going to break someone's TOS then at least be aware of it. That helps later on when you have to face the consequences. Just like I'd like to know when I'm speeding, rather than to pretend to be ignorant of the limit. That way I'd know my exposure.
Let me know when you find a non human "[F5] + [CTRL+S]". Or link me to the alien crawlers you seem to imply. Are there amazon instances of crawlers owned by non-human entities?
Do you consider the "death by bullet" to be caused by humans? By the transfer of momentum of lead? By gunpowder combustion? By human fingers pressing triggers? By time? It time killing humans? Oh no.
How long must the causal chain be for you to consider it non human?
> [F5] + [CTRL+S]
> a browser auto-refresh capability
> $ watch wget
> getpocket.com
> an IFTTT recipe
> A crawler
I can put all of these in motion. I can also write a macro that triggers them. Is there a difference? Twitter seems to want to be the arbiter of it (if it makes a difference).
That is the only spirit of the law: We reserve the right to consider your actions wrong.
US has been very good of late about charging people that have never been to the US for violation of US laws online. It is bullshit but it seems many nations refuse to protect their citizens from harassment by the US legal system
It is worth noting that TMZ and other sites have been storing and detecting deleted celebrity tweets for years, and still do it to this day. If you're not using the API, Twitter has no affirmative way of knowing how you obtained the information.
Relevant part: "You may not do any of the following while accessing or using the Services: (...) crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without the prior consent of Twitter is expressly prohibited"
At least that is my layman logic. But we live in a world where ~50 page long EULAs exist, so layman logic may not be applicable in this case.
If the law truly agrees that acceptance of undisclosed terms is granted simply by virtue of access, it opens the door to rampant abuse.
Though, if you want to try the protecting yourself in a similar approach, add a header to every request in your browser that says "By responding to this request, you accept that I do NOT agree to your terms and you are willing to serve me anyway." At least in this case they would actually receive your terms with the request. I wish there was an RFC for this.
Having multiple users send in the same tweet could count as additional validation that it was not edited.
To make this work, someone can set up a 'shell company' that signs up for the Twitter API for a seemingly legitimate reason, and captures the actual events of verified accounts tweeting. Then, this service sends out events to all the crowdsourced clients to browse to the Twitter page and capture the content, and submit it to the project.
The behavior of the crowdsourced clients would be undetectable from a normal web user, and there would be a layer of indirection between the client signed up for the Twitter API and the curators of the submitted tweets.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-tw...
- Foo tweets
- Bar takes a snapshot of Foo's tweet
- Foo deletes tweet
- Bar displays Foo's deleted tweet on own website
Twitter tells Bar to shut up.
(Twitter would, however, continue to store the deleted tweet. It wouldn't display it, though.)
This is why /r/creepshots was taken down, despite being completely legal and within the Reddit rules. It damaged the brand.
Same reason why the "hate speech" against Islam was taken off of /r/news.
They're a user generated site (UGC). Truth is that their brand was mostly in the hands of their users from day one. And it's extremely hard to wrestle that control out of the hands of your users without suffering some pushback. In come cases, this pushback can even kill a site by making community disenfranchised.
Reddit has been doing a lot of censorship lately and people are slowly leaving that site. By exerting more free speech restrictions, they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase.
Here's an example of Reddit censorship in action: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06...
And then there's this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06...
And this is just creepy:
‘We know your dark secrets. We know everything.’ Boasts Reddit CEO Steve Huffman
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-yo...
Alienating racists, woman-haters, and pedophiles! Heavens, what an awful thing to do!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Avoid gratuitous negativity.
If such a thread happened here, you can be sure @dang would nuke them, too.
of course, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) still apply.
What I am saying is, terribly as it may seem, hate can also be belief.
(And that belief is very similar to "The Third Wave" experiment – I recommend reading the books or movies to try to understand the right-populist movement in many countries today)
After all, though, it’s well worth it, and should be standard material in all schools.
If you want a more technical view, there’s also scientific writeups about "The Third Wave".
Personally as long as Stormfront, etc.'s ISPs don't get hit by government orders to shut them down I don't mind Reddit deciding to nix such stuff on their site. Social pressure is in some instances a good way to push change that we for whatever reason don't want to mandate legally. But if the discourse surrounding the recent political upheavals that the US and UK have experienced has demonstrated anything, it's that immediately accusing anyone who even considers disagreeing with you of secret racism does nothing but preclude anything productive from happening.
Even if you think such tactics are fair game, they are consistently ineffective. Save such things for people you actually know enough about to know they are racist, sexist, etc.
Granted , Reddit is a bit wider in scope than Something Awful (for example) but it's still a community in itself that can make decisions on content.
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.
I understand that it would violate the ToS if they conducted this directly through Twitter, and that may or may not be a big deal depending on the local Jurisprudence and other factors- but say an application was using the Twitter API to reproduce the tweets of persons of interest, and prompting deleting them as required-- what then is to prevent our foreign fictitious company from scraping THAT service?
Twitter should not be asserting itself in this kind of overreach. Personally I look forward to it's continued decline in value.
Twitter has plenty of lawyers, and can afford to hire plenty more, including lawyers in whatever country you set this up in. They could go after owners, workers, hosting companies, ad providers, network providers, and anybody else with a significant connection.
Who knows if they'd bother. But I don't think anybody should expect a simple dodge to make them completely safe.
Can the archive project or similar crawl twitter to save content?
What kind of checks and balances should social media networks have? Supone they be regulated?
http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
Though they generally do last minute emergency backups of closing sites, so this probably isn't a job for them.