Politicians’ Deleted Tweets Can No Longer Be Tracked

Pro Publica reports:

Politicians haven’t stopped deleting some of their most cringeworthy tweets, but Politwoops, our project that has tracked and archived more than half a million deleted tweets from candidates and elected officials since 2012, is no longer able to track them.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has disabled the function we used to track deletions — and the new method that Twitter says should identify them appears to be broken.

Some deleted posts are hard to forget, like one from then-President Donald Trump in the early evening of Jan. 6, 2021, not long after a mob invaded the U.S. Capitol and assaulted police officers in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.

Read the full article.

New: Whether officials were deleting an embarrassing post or just correcting a typo, Politwoops tracked them all. But service changes made after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter have rendered it impossible for us to continue tracking these tweets. https://t.co/eUnq4H28zA

— ProPublica (@propublica) February 24, 2023