Tag: Twitter

This New Year’s Eve, we reached an agreement with Twitter and our partners to bring back the transparency and accountability tool called Politwoops.

San Francisco – Today Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged his company’s support for free expression, accountability, and transparency. His statement — including an explicit mention of Politwoops, the politician accountability tool — is a clear response to grassroots pressure, including an open letter signed by 50 global groups in support of Politwoops.

Today Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged his company’s support for free expression, accountability, and transparency. His statement — including an explicit mention of Politwoops, a politician accountability tool — is to be applauded. We’re happy to see Twitter’s commitment to accountability and transparency online, and we encourage the sector to follow Twitter’s lead.

This week the Open State Foundation, creator of Politwoops, uploaded more than one million deleted politicians’ tweets to the Internet Archive, preserving the information for the public record. The collection archives the deleted tweets of 10,404 politicians worldwide, which were published before Twitter cut off Open State’s access to its Application Programming Interface, or API. Unfortunately, Twitter still refuses to reinstate access to the API, which means that people in 32 countries can’t see what politicians are deleting right now.

Last week, Twitter shut down a tool that helps people hold politicians accountable in 29 countries around the world. The Netherlands-based civil society group Open State Foundation created Politwoops, which scans the Twitter accounts of politicians for tweets they’ve deleted. Deleted tweets can provide insight to the viewpoints of public officials, and journalists have been using Politwoops to keep representatives accountable for what they say publicly. This is an especially disappointing decision because Twitter has been a champion of transparency and free expression for some time.

Turkey recently blocked users’ access to Twitter and YouTube in an effort to censor material posted by users, just as it did in March of last year. If users are willing to fight back against government censorship, social media companies should support them in their efforts

Last month, Twitter released its most recent transparency report, and it provides important insights into the evolving issue of freedom of expression online. The report confirms that Turkey has become a hotbed of censorship since Tayyip Erdogan was sworn in as President in August 2014 and launched a crackdown on the media.

Activists involved in the organization of the first Gezi park protests in Turkey are currently standing trial, which Amnesty International describes as “a vindictive, politically motivated show trial without a shred of evidence of actual crimes.”

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blocks Twitter, another step in his ongoing war against the open internet.

This morning eight major internet companies — AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo! — issued a broad and powerful call for surveillance reform. The joint statement represents the strongest stance yet by U.S. internet companies on government surveillance and has the potential to shift the debate in Washington.