With the recent news of Twitter shutting down sites dedicated to archiving politicians tweets, we are seeing the true nature of the New Twitter.

And I for one, do not like it.

I remember a time when Twitter took it's place on the internet seriously, not from a money generation standpoint, but from a user and informational standpoint.

Low, Behold the Golden Days

There were APIs freely available for developers to build new and exciting things that brought value to the platform, and for the most part, are responsible for their being a platform at all.

Twitter became an insanely powerful agent for change. Allowing people who previously had no way of sharing their story, do so. And as a result we had amazing moments like the Arab Spring.

This statement from Twitter, thinly vieled BS that it is, about privacy and speech is the death knell for a service that had the potential to really affect the world, and most importantly for me, our political system.

A tweet from a political candidate, during an election year, is NOT personal speech. It should be collected and catalogued by default. The only way we can have any positive change in this country is to have an informed populace.

Twitter could have been a lynch pin in this, but chose to be an obstacle instead. Allowing politicians to hide their bigotry, misogyny and general stupidity from the people who are asked to vote for them is not only wrong, it is morally repugnant.