Tweeted, deleted: theoretical, methodological, and ethical considerations for examining politicians’ deleted tweets

ABSTRACT

In an election, political candidates often slip up and want a do-over. On Twitter, they get this chance. Candidates can delete tweets and hope no one notices. But organizations such as Politwoops notice. Politwoops archives politicians’ deletions in the hopes of bringing more transparency and accountability to political discourse. This article discusses the theoretical value, methodological challenges, and ethical considerations of examining deleted tweets and using the Politwoops archive. Specifically, this article (a) discusses how analysis of deleted tweets can expand and deepen research on impression management and online self-presentations in elections, (b) proposes the use of an intertextual content analysis ‒ a hybrid approach that incorporates elements of a qualitative content analysis and an intertextual interpretative analysis ‒ when analyzing deletions, (c) investigates and exposes some of the limitations of the Politwoops archive, and (d) given the limitations of the Politwoops archive, discusses the potential ethical dilemmas of researchers creating their own datasets of deleted tweets. Overall, analyzing deletions can reveal what campaigns strategically present and hide from voters in order to create electable personas. To uncover the content of candidates’ deleted tweets and how they may contribute to impression management, researchers must first consider several methodological and ethical matters.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• deleted tweets
• impression management
• politics
• politicians
• data ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Lindsey Meeks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma. Her research interests include political communication, gender, and media [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. Politwoops also archives deleted tweets in several other countries: http://www.politwoops.eu/countries

2. For example, Almuhimedi et al. (2013) categorized deleted tweets as typos or rephrasings by examining subsequent tweets and using edit distance to measure character-level similarity between tweets, and cosine similarity to assess word-level similarity. If the content of a deleted tweet was measured as very similar to a subsequent tweet, the researchers categorized the deleted tweet as a typo or rephrasing deletion. Hovey (2010) also detected typo deletions in a similar manner, but used a program called Aether.

3. Prior to the deleted tweet, Murphy also tweeted the following on 20 October: ‘Proud to earn the endorsement of the @nytimes. http://t.co/vWi5fdZC#CTSen.’

4. An example of such a script can be found here: https://github.com/rainersigwald/twitter_archiver.

5. Twitter’s firehose is a real-time stream of tweets; it is Twitter’s name for access to all worldwide tweets as they happen. Twitter negotiates agreements with third-party vendors for access to firehose data. Twitter’s streaming API provides a sample of tweets from the firehose that are occurring in near real time. The timeline API allows users to access up to 3200 tweets on a specific account, and the search API can return 5000 tweets on a keyword search, or a filtered sample in near real time.