T.C. Sottek, writing for The Verge:

This is a terrible precedent, even if it’s not surprising. Twitter, like all profit-driven social platforms, has to make money — which means at some point it starts serving certain audiences (like celebrities and politicians) more than its ideals of free expression and transparency. The company sells itself as a democratizing tool the world over, but its actual commitment is more complicated. Twitter does care about preserving tweets — for brands.

It’s unfortunate that Twitter’s attempting to shut this sort of activity down through the API, but what’s stopping users at large from taking screenshots and sharing tweets that are found before deletion? Nothing. And I imagine plenty of foolish tweets will continue to be found, they’ll just be published by different sources.