Twitter is making it easier for government leaders to undo tweets.
The social media site is shutting down apps that track politicians' deleted tweets.
Good government groups around the world set up these apps to track when politicians decide to unsay something they said on Twitter.
Just one bad tweet of 140 characters can cause many problems for a politician, like former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York. He torpedoed his political career when private tweets to women turned public.
“Turns out there's a great view you can have of what members of Congress are saying by watching what they unsay,” said John Wonderlich with the Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation set up the Politwoops website to keep track of the tweets politicians would rather you forget. Every tweet members of Congress deleted lived on there until Twitter blocked the site from accessing its tweets.
“We're losing a really rich picture of what members of congress and top politicians are doing,” Wonderlich said.
Politwoops was the first site affected, but this week Twitter also stopped similar sites dedicated to tracking politicians in 30 countries.
Twitter says it's all about its terms of service; being able to delete tweets is part of that.
A spokesman told Channel 2’s Justin Gray “the ability to delete one's tweets for whatever reason has been a long-standing feature of Twitter for all users.”
But Wonderlich says you can't just unsay things on the internet even if you hit the delete button.
“The most embarrassing things are likely to still be got we just have a less reliable picture of it,” he said.
The Sunlight Foundation says in the U.S. most deleted tweets are likely to still be noticed and saved forever by someone who screenshots them, even without Twitter's cooperation.
That might not be the case in other countries with fewer freedoms, like Egypt and Turkey, where Twitter this week also shut down these apps.