Whose Side Is Twitter On?

Here are three ways that Twitter has ingrained itself into the political process in the last week alone:

• Twitter hired three separate firms, contributing 10 representatives in total, to lobby the US government on issues like net neutrality and privacy.

• Twitter announced on Tuesday that US users will be able to make in-app donations to political parties.

• Also on Tuesday, Twitter announced that it will help Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May participate in a debate she was not invited to by shooting and posting video responses to moderator questions in near-real time.

This all makes sense for Twitter. Positioning its platform as ever more central for political discussions is smart, especially since Facebook—Twitter's competitor when it comes to publishers and other groups choosing where to send their content—is making its own elections-related moves lately. And, as anyone who's lurked Twitter during an election event knows, this politics stuff is some hot fire.

But Twitter's alterations to the political discussion online aren't summed up in its additions. There were subtractions, too.

At the tail end of August—what we could describe as the run-up to the current maelstrom of politicking—Twitter banned a popular account called Politwoops, which used Twitter's API to post politicians' deleted comments for posterity. Human rights groups have since called for Politwoops' reinstatement, arguing that politicians' statements are a matter of public record, and Twitter should not help them to bury their gaffes. Twitter has not reinstated Politwoops' API access.

A cynical take on this might be, as the Electronic Frontier Federation's Parker Higgins noted on Twitter, that the Politwoops ban was a strategic move on Twitter's part. "Harder to lobby folks who've embarrassed themselves on your site," Higgins wrote, in reference to the news that Twitter had hired lobbyists. This may be the case, although difficult to substantiate. At the very least, though, the Politwoops ban is a glaring contradiction in Twitter's current campaign to facilitate campaigning.

Giving marginalized political parties an outlet is a good thing for the diversity of political discourse, and net neutrality and personal privacy are causes worth fighting for. But while Twitter works to give politicians a leg up, monetarily and in terms of outreach, it's more than a little curious that a service meant to expose the mistakes of the people that Twitter is now working so closely with remains banned.

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The kind of political engagement that Twitter facilitates has an oddly one-way feel as a result. Of course, everyone on the site is still free to make as many dank political memes and hot piss takes as they want. But at the services level—which ones Twitter chooses to provide directly or facilitate with access only it can grant, such as to its API—the lines of conversation are being drawn around how, exactly, politicians can be taken to task on the site.

This is interesting, since Twitter is often thought of as a more egalitarian platform; one that encourages discourse. This isn't to say that there haven't been imbalances of communicative power in play since the beginning—the coveted blue "verified" check, for example—but here, Twitter is explicitly helping out those at the top of the political hierarchy, while taking away a tool of value for those of us at the bottom.

Twitter is becoming a political force, and the question now is: whose side is it on? Unbanning Politwoops would go a long way to answering that.