The Politwoops website, which launched in 2012 to keep tabs on tweets deleted by known politicians, saw its feed dry up in the middle of May with no announcement. After Gawker reporter J.K. Trotter began investigating the story this week, he got the answer that Politwoops' founders, the "government transparency" non-profit Sunlight Foundation, hadn't: Twitter itself revoked the site's access to Twitter's API.

"We strongly support Sunlight’s mission of increasing transparency in politics and using civic tech and open data to hold government accountable to constituents," a Twitter representative told Gawker on Wednesday, "but preserving deleted Tweets violates our developer agreement. Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress."

The last major update to Twitter's developer agreement came on May 18, three days after Politwoops' access had been revoked. Twitter had announced changes to the agreement in April, and that announcement revolved largely around the company moving its non-American account data to Irish data centers.

“Blessed” no more

However, at that time, Twitter didn't loudly announce the change that apparently affected Politwoops' operation: that developers should "only surface Twitter activity as it surfaced on Twitter." As an example, the agreement now states that when users delete or "unfavorite" any posts, developers should respond "not by publicly displaying to other users that the Tweet is no longer favorited or has been deleted." In other words, when it's deleted from Twitter, it should be removed from any site or service that sips from Twitter's firehose. (Perhaps this will encourage Barbra Streisand to create a Twitter account.)

Sunlight Foundation president Christopher Gates responded to Twitter's actions on Thursday, pointing out that Politwoops' API access had been revoked once before in 2012. After Gates had a conversation with Twitter over the site's goals at the time, and promised to add curation to its tweet aggregation process, he said he received "blessings from Twitter."

After complaining about Twitter's recent lack of transparency—and unwillingness to reactivate Politwoops' API access in any way—Gates ultimately conceded, but not happily. "We will honor Twitter's latest decision, but it stands at odds with a fundamental understanding of our democracy," he wrote. "A member of Congress does not and should not have the same expectation of privacy as a private citizen. Power can only be accountable with a generous application of transparency."

In its three years of operation, Politwoops wasn't connected to any particularly salacious political retractions—especially since Anthony Weiner's most infamous Twitter activity happened in 2011, and his "Carlos Danger" alias never operated on Twitter. The best we found came from a Washington Post report, which pointed to a few posts about American POW Bowe Bergdahl that were eventually deleted once the soldier had become connected to allegations of desertion—meaning politicians who'd jumped the Bergdahl-praise gun were caught by Politwoops.

Gates' post didn't mention any desire or workaround to continue operating Politwoops—for example, by scraping publicly available Twitter data instead of using the official API. (Update: In an e-mailed statement to Ars Technica, Sunlight communications manager Jenn Topper confirmed that Politwoops "does not have plans at this time to create a workaround" to continue operating.)

We have asked Twitter representatives to speak about its revocation of Politwoops' API, and we will update this report with any response.