Twitter urged firms to delete data during 2016 campaign

Want to get cut off from Twitter? Don't delete posts marked as deleted.

This comes back to a previous point I've made: Twitter has a set of corporate morals, and isn't afraid to stick to them, even when there's a cost. I admire that trait.

prosecution and all law enforcement agencies involved in this are a joke for having missed all this, and still be missing, despite all their multibillion spying programs.

Points to a general principle: as difficult as it can be, if you want to study data from the web later you should be archiving it yourself. You can't trust it or archives not affiliated with you to be available. If you handle it right, you probably can get away with breaking quite a lot of ToS to do so.

1) the main thrust of the story is confusing. At one point we're discussing Twitter privacy rules, later on the security researches talk about Twitter's policies on deleting content that violates their ToS. Which one is it? It's a fairly important distinction. If Twitter is protecting the privacy of their users(demanding that companies delete tweets that users have themselves deleted), then this is a big non-story. If Twitter is deleting things breaching their ToS, then the researchers may have a point about preserving that information.

2) the accounts are conflicting. The journalist initially writes:

"In June and September of 2016, the company posted updates to its privacy policy and user agreements that reminded firms".

Later on, the journalist presents a statement from a Mr Woolley:

“All social media companies have deletion policies,” Woolley added. “However, when policies are changed during pivotal political moments — and when the company has regularly been warned its platform is the vessel for civic manipulation in similar moments — one is right to wonder, why then?”

This quote does not make sense, since by the journalist's assertion, Twitter did not change their policy. Keep in mind, the journalist did not quote Twitter as saying "we reminded firms", the journalist stated this as if it was fact.

3) the story lacks details. The main "twist" of the story is here:

"But some government and private-sector cybersecurity analysts said the changes were far more significant, and had the effect of prompting data firms to destroy potentially large amounts of information that could be relevant to probes of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. "

None of the quotes following this illuminate how the changes were more significant, and why they had this effect. The talking head points either repeat Woolley's assertions, or give you conclusions, like this:

“Their implementation and the decision to physically destroy these data raises critical issues on accountability that social-media service providers should be asked to address moving forward,”

(You can only argue this if you have already proven that their changes were "far more significant"!)

Later on, you have a wild assertion based on zero sources:

"For at least four years before the 2016 election, researchers who monitor Twitter had openly criticized Russia for using the platform to meddle in other elections, especially in Ukraine."

This sounds like something important! Too bad there's no source, no follow-up, no examples. If it was actually followed up, it would bolster the argument of the researchers. (it's not like the article doesn't have links to other stories, just not anything relevant...) Speaking of which...

4) the story does not argument well why we should care

The reason why we should care is given in the last paragraphs of the story:

“If certain aspects of content on Twitter reveals that there has been interference in our elections, especially by foreign actors but also by people in our country, the public has a right to know,” Woolley said.

“But before the public has the right to know, I think that congressional investigators, third-party researchers, a lot of other people need to have this information. And this effort to obfuscate information that has been deleted or made private is super problematic.”

Where does this come from? Why does the public have a "right to know"? There's no law behind this(or at least, it's not quoted here); this is a moral plea disguised in the trappings of authoritative language.

The only group from the listed aggrieved parties with an actual "right to know" are congressional investigators; those already have a mechanism to demand information be preserved for an investigation. Now, if the story was that something was under congressional investigation, and Twitter had been told to preserve documents, but had refused to do so, this might be actually something. But none of that is here. Why should we care that "information warfare experts" have certain demands that Twitter isn't meeting? What makes their demands important? The article starts off with the conclusion that what they're doing is important, and thus it's "super problematic" for Twitter to not respond.

Since the article's main argument is a moral plea - "we have a right to know", I need to know the underlying moral principles that the researchers or the journalist used to argue this position. I cannot see any good faith attempt to reconcile Twitter's privacy concerns, or Twitter's right to conduct their business with the demands from the researchers; therefore, I conclude that this isn't a principled stance but rather just another call to abandon laws and principles in the face of the Great Trump Moral Panic.

So next time get a subpoena?