Politicians sometimes regret what they tweeted. With Politwoops one can search and find tweets that politicians have deleted. Adding 768 candidates in the Dutch elections, today Open State Foundation launched a new version of Politwoops. Besides automated archiving of deleted tweets by politicians, the new version of Politwoops has improved search and filter options and shows realtime statistics. It’s now easier to see how fast a tweet has been deleted by a politician or a candidate for the elections, what and when politicians and what parties delete the most.
Forum for Democracy, Labourparty and PVV deleted the most
The past month, politicians of Forum for Democratie deleted relatively most tweets (1 in 13), followed by candidates of the Dutch Labourparty, PVV and the Libertarian party. SGP politicians, StemNL, VNL and socialist candidates deleted relatively the least amount of tweets. On average, politicians delete one in 32 tweets. On Tuesdays they are the most active, not only by posting tweets but also by deleting them, most often, within an hour.
Geert Wilders deletes his own retweets to retweet
The past month, Mohammed Chahim of the Dutch Labourparty deleted 169 tweets. He deleted most tweets on one single day, 30 January, at the beginning of the election campaign. Candidates of Forum for Democracy, Arjan de Kok and Gert Reedijk and VNL candidate Alexander Sassen van Elsloo deleted tweets that included a fake poll. Arjan Kok of Forum for Democracy, PVV leader Geert Wilders and PVV candidate Maikel Boon and 50PLUS-candidate André van Wanrooij also delete a lot of tweets. Geert Wilders deletes mostly retweets of his own tweets in order to retweet them again. For example, his new campaign add.
Total Twitter reach of Dutch politicians is 5.6 million followers
With 768 candidates with a Twitter account, Dutch politicians have a total reach of 5.6 million followers on Twitter. More than 80% of the candidates of VVD, Geenpeil, D66, Christenunie, GroenLinks, de Ondernemerspartij, SP and PVV have a Twitter account. Geert Wilders has the largest amount of followers (770K) followed by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. His Prime Minister account has 750K followers and his own personal account is followed by 84K Twitter accounts.
Politwoops
Politwoops archives and publishes since 2010 deleted tweets of politicians. Open State Foundation has launched Politwoops since then in 54 countries and the European parliament. These websites are often used by journalists and others, especially during elections. The US version of Politwoops is run by ProPublica.
