Recover politicians' deleted tweets on Politwoops

New York: Social networking website Twitter and Politwoops have struck a deal that would allow people to access the controversial tweets that politicians posted and later deleted after public outcry.

Politwoops will relaunch in the "coming months" and it provides services in countries including India, the US, France and Canada, CNET.com reported on Saturday.

Run by the US-based Sunlight Foundation and managed by a Netherlands-based transparency group Open State Foundation, the Politwoops is a website that archives controversial tweets that politicians make and then delete these after public outcry.

The "website of erased Twitter gaffes" was disrupted last year as Twitter stopped giving it access to code that made preservation of the tweets possible, claiming that the archive broke its rules and hurt privacy.

Twitter had previously said that "it supported increasing transparency in politics and using civic tech and open data to hold government accountable to constituents but saving and publishing deleted tweets broke its rules and violated its users' privacy".

However, the Politwoops argued that "a citizen's right to information outweighs a political figure's right to retroactively edit a statement".

In a statement, the Open State Foundation said the deal was the result of several meetings with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

"We have a responsibility to continue to empower organisations that bring more transparency to public dialogue, such as Politwoops," Dorsey said.

Meanwhile, it is not clear when Politwoops would again start posting deleted tweets.

The Open State Foundation said that "in the 'coming months' it will relaunch Politwoops in the more than 30 countries in which it had been available and that it will look to add more countries to the list".