Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation writes, “As 2013 winds down and Washington retreats to spend the holidays with family and friends, the Sunlight Foundation looks back at the many gifts politicians left for Politwoops in 2013 as they deleted messages once shared eagerly with their followers. Of the more than 1,000 accounts followed by Politwoops, 76% of them deleted something over the course of the year.
This lengthy recap sifts through the 3,500+ deletions on Politwoops to identify the top 5 deleters and the very best deletions of the year. From a campaign removing hundreds of tweets in a morning, a politician deleting tweets on purpose to make news and a CISPA co-sponsor boasting about contributions from interest groups, this year in review shows there’s a lot of room for improvement for politicians on Twitter in 2014.
The top Politwoopers with the most approved deletions for the year are:
1. @ColbertBuschSC with 517 deletions – The campaign account of House Challenger Elizabeth Colbert Busch, D-N.C., deleted hundreds of tweets before the special election in May to fill the former House seat of Sen. Tim Scott, R-N.C., which she ended up losing. When asked by Sunlight why the campaign deleted this unprecedented volume of tweets, the communications director responded, “We just had a much higher percentage of ‘re-tweets’ then tweets directly from the account.”
2. @SenatorIsakson with 109 deletions – Over the course of 3 months, Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., systematically deleted tweets that were 26 weeks old. Politwoops uncovered this peculiar activity and now serves as the only archive of these once-public messages. When Sunlight called for an explanation, his office realized they had accidentally turned on an auto-delete feature of a third-party Twitter app and promptly deactivated it…
Politwoops 2013: the year’s top politicians and their best deletions from Twitter
(Thanks, Nicko!)