Watchdog saves politicians’ deleted tweets

{mosads}“In politics, Twitter is part of the ever-present ‘spin room’ of the digital age. But unlike other mediums, the record of events can be edited; tweets deleted from twitter.com are hard or impossible to see after the fact,” said Tom Lee, director of Sunlight Labs, in a statement. “Politwoops identifies when politicians or their staffs are editing errors or rephrasing a tweet, providing a window into what politicians are thinking and how campaigns hone their social media messaging.”

Congressional offices have been known to remove a tweet if their account gets hacked, if they want to fix a typo, or if the tweet was sent by accident (legislators pocket-tweet, too).

But now those tweets will be preserved in the name of transparency. The site will update in near-real time.