Twitter's decision to ban archiving of politicians' deleted tweets is a mistake

[Commentary] Twitter’s commitment to transparency appears to end when it makes the powerful uncomfortable. Back in 2012, Twitter decided to allow the Sunlight Foundation to collect and curate deleted tweets from lawmakers and people seeking public office in order to hold them accountable by preserving their public statements on the record. That behavior was in-line with a company whose founders constantly sold it as the nexus of free speech. "We are the free speech wing of the free speech party," Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo famously said that same year. But in June of 2015, Twitter shut down the deleted tweet project in the US under the guise of "honoring the expectation of user privacy." Then, on Aug 23, Twitter dealt the final blow, killing the Open State Foundation’s effort to archive deleted tweets from public officials in 30 other countries.

This is a terrible precedent, even if it’s not surprising. Twitter, like all profit-driven social platforms, has to make money -- which means at some point it starts serving certain audiences (like celebrities and politicians) more than its ideals of free expression and transparency. Twitter should reverse this harmful decision. The change in policy directly contradicts the company's mission statement, which is "to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers." Restricting use of an API to let the powerful erase their words is an Orwellian memory hole and nothing but a barrier to expression in a free society. A social platform with a record that’s only accessible to advertisers isn’t a public square -- it’s just another circus.