Twitter Busts Tweet-Archiving Website PostGhost

Well, we liked the name, at least.

PostGhost has officially announced that its service is no more, and its creators must have seen this day coming the minute they up with the idea. Twitter, after all, has never been the biggest fan of sites that scan Twitter and archive users' tweets. Previously, it had shut down Politwoops, which archived tweets that political entities or politicians deleted in the hopes of keeping said message from the public eye. (Politwoops has since returned, but it took some negotiating.)

Perhaps PostGhost suffers from the fact that it's not just going after politicians, where a case can be made for openness and transparency regarding public statements made by those presumably serving the public. PostGhost, on the other hand, archived tweets from anyone with a verified badge and at least 10,000 followers. That's a much bigger net.

"Other sites show deleted tweets from politicians. But in an election year where the line between celebrity and politics is increasingly blurred, we believe it's in the public interest to maintain a record of public statements of every Twitter user who has the ability to reach thousands or millions of followers with a single click or tap," PostGhost described.

According to a message from Twitter, PostGhost violated two section of Twitter's developer policy: not responding immediately to content changes on the service (as in, PostGhost doesn't delete people's tweets when people delete them or protect them), and not displaying tweets on the site "as it surfaced on Twitter"—a similar deal.

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"Of course, not every Twitter user should have their deleted tweets recorded – most people use Twitter as a personal account, and we firmly agree with Twitter's commitment to their privacy. However, Twitter maintains a list of public figures called verified users – about 0.05% of their user base – for whom Twitter acts as an outsized, instantaneous megaphone to reach vast numbers of followers. PostGhost only reports on half of this small subset – verified users with tens of thousands of followers, or more. We believe that for such prominent verified Twitter users, the public has a right to see their public Twitter history, whether or not they grow to regret the statements they've made," reads PostGhost's response.

It remains to be seen what negotiations, if any, PostGhost might have with Twitter to restore the site's archival features. Given the immediacy of the takedown—the site lasted all of a day or so before Twitter demanded its removal—we suspect the social network doesn't plan to budge.