It’s noteworthy that Sunlight’s dance in 2012 was based on creating a human curation workflow for looking at these deleted tweets — the “layer of journalistic judgment” Gates references. That takes the deleted tweet from a direct API-generated product to something journalistic. That argument worked in 2012; it apparently doesn’t in 2015. Erasing that journalistic distinction could conceivably allow Twitter to argue the display of any deleted tweet in any form on a website was a violation of the developer agreement — so long as the Twitter API was in use anywhere on the site.

Now, realistically, Twitter isn’t going to tell The New York Times to take down a story centered on a deleted congressional tweet — the blowback would be 100× what they’ve faced in the past 24 hours.

But the fact that Twitter now explicitly says the journalistic exception it once recognized is no longer valid — and the fact that its developer agreement language defines the governed “Services” so broadly — demands, at a minimum, that Twitter explain itself more thoroughly than a one-paragraph statement. The public utterances of public officials deserve scrutiny beyond those of everyday citizens — that’s a core value of a free press.