Politwoops, an archive of tweets that politicians have deleted from Twitter after posting, is once again active and searchable. The website allows for searching of an individual politician's deleted tweets, filtering by state, political party or political office, and keyword searching. Currently the archive covers Twitter accounts for elected officials and candidates for president, Senate, House and governor, with plans to expand to executive branch officials and state representatives.
The archive is a project of the Sunlight Foundation, which had previously operated it from 2012 until May 2015 when Twitter shut down API access for the Politwoops archive. Twitter and the Sunlight Foundation reached an agreement at the end of December to restore access to the deleted tweet data, which was officially relaunched yesterday.
An example of recent deleted tweets from the presidential campaign.
An advertised upgrade of this relaunched version of the archive: Politwoops will now consist of a complete archive of all political tweets that have been deleted, whereas the prior version was curated to contain only more important content (for example the change in messaging following the return of POW Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl). As many tweets are deleted for typographical reasons or are duplicate postings, Politwoops also plans to introduce new filtering tools to make these easier to sort out.
A note for when researching with the Politwoops archive: the 8 month shutoff means there is a gap between May 15, 2015 and January 25, 2016 during which no deleted tweets were archived.
The Politwoops gap between the last tweets captured before the shutoff in May 2015, and the first tweets captured when the archive was reactivated in late-January 2016.