Former politician Arend Jan Boekesteijn will remember his tweet about the Chinese well. Even though he quickly deleted it, it was no use. He had been seen and mirrors were made so that everyone could read that he had written: 'Yes, I sometimes overlook a slanted eye, there are so many!' Politicians spend a lot of time perfecting their message to the public. But everyone makes a typo now and then, especially on Twitter.
It has been three years since Politwoops was born during a Hack de Overheid hackathon . 'Twoops' are tweets that were not really meant for a large audience. In many cases, politicians quickly delete them.
The term Politwoops stands for politicians who make a mistake or blunder ('oops') on Twitter. On the latvia phone number list website Politwoops.nl, all deleted Twitter messages from both national and local politicians are collected and displayed. Politicians who make an incorrect statement on Twitter can easily delete their tweet. Politwoops collects all these deleted messages and publishes them anyway. From small typos to bigger blunders. The Politwoops API is therefore indeed part of parliamentary history.
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The open source project 'Politwoops' offers transparency, but also starts the debate about the memory of the internet. Even if something is deleted, it can often still be found. What started with Dutch parliamentarians and city council members has now been rolled out to 26 countries . This month India and since a day Ireland have been added to the API. In the United Kingdom Metro even keeps a weekly top ten.
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Conservative Party 'technical error'
For example, British MP Rob Wilson accidentally sent a link to a porn site instead of a link to a BBC article. He deleted this tweet after 14 minutes. Interestingly, this was not a mistake, but the link was sent to him by the Conservative Party headquarters. This is often the source of tweets that they advise their members to send. The headquarters said that Wilson was interested in such a story and sent him a link. 'It appears that a technical error has been made', was the message to the Daily Mail . The shortened URL that Wilson then sent out was missing a number.