Twitter was able to suspend API access to the sites after it followed a "thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors."
My ass.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC: "Better dead than smeg."
TPRJones wrote:Still, they are nonetheless violating the terms of service, no?
Nope, the terms of service were for the use of the API.
I'm sure there's ToS issues around scraping the web (in terms of volume), but snapshotting a singlle or few deleted tweets does not appear to cause a violation from what I've read.