Once again proving that relying on Twitter’s API is not the safest business strategy, Twitter Inc has revoked access for Politwoops, a service that monitors political accounts for deleted tweets and archives them.

The goal of Politwoops is to preserve potential gaffes by politicians who may tweet before they think. By archiving deleted tweets, Politwoops ensures that the public sees everything that comes out of official political accounts, no matter how quickly someone’s publicist or press secretary pulls the plug.

The service’s job is going to be all but impossible now without access to Twitter’s API, and it does not look like the microblog is going to change its mind.

Twitter said in a statement to Gawker:

Earlier today we spoke to the Sunlight Foundation, to tell them we will not restore Twitter API access for their Politwoops site. We strongly support Sunlight’s mission of increasing transparency in politics and using civic tech and open data to hold government accountable to constituents, 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.

But in a blog post titled “Eulogy for Politwoops,” Sunlight Foundation President Christopher Gates said that Twitter had originally given Politwoops the green light.

Gates wrote:

Days after Politwoops launched in 2012, Twitter contacted the Sunlight Foundation and told us, “Your service violates our API Terms of Service on a fundamental level.” We explained the goals of the project and agreed to create a human curation workflow to ensure that the site screened out corrected low-value tweets like typos, links and Twitter handles. We implemented this layer of journalistic judgment with blessings from Twitter and the site continued.

Gates added that the Politwoops team is ” truly mystified as to what prompted the change of heart,” given that the service had operated without trouble for three years. He explained that while Politwoops will unfortunately be no more, “Sunlight will continue to work to open up more data and help lead the movement to make our government and our politics more open and accountable.”

Photo by eldh