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> was extensively used by the media to investigate instances of deception, corruption and ineptitude. Because getting an intern to hack up a 5 minute Python sc
by smegel 11y ago
> was extensively used by the media to investigate instances of deception, corruption and ineptitude.
Because getting an intern to hack up a 5 minute Python script to do the same is too much effort? OK maintaining a list of current politicians current Twitter accounts is probably where the work is, but if you are interested in a number of prominent accounts this is not that hard a task.
- hanniabu 11y agoComments like this make me realize how little I know >.<
- patrickdavey 11y agoHow exciting!! lots to learn :)
- patrickaljord 11y agoThe twitter api allows to get a feed per author name, so if you have a list of users, that's pretty easy. All you need to do is use a basic http client lib in your prefered language to do the http query and then some basic html css skills to show the result there :)
- hanniabu 11y agoI've never worked with the twitter api, but now that you mention that, I see where you're going with it. Does seem pretty straight forward now.
- A_COMPUTER 11y agoHere: http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ It's a perl script that can hook into Twitter stream API. Sign up for an account, create an access token for ttytter, start subscribing to politicians, and it will suck down every tweet they make in realtime as they make them. If they make a tweet and delete it 30 seconds later, you'll have captured it. That is why whining about deletability of tweets is pointless, anybody with entry-level Linux skills can monitor thousands of politicians.
- ajays 11y agoIt can be easily done; but I think the problem here is that if you're using the Twitter API (as is the case with the link you mentioned), you are required to honor deletion requests. If you don't, then your access is revoked, which is what happened in this case. Now, you could just archive the tweets internally and reveal them under some other name...
- cinquemb 11y agoThen again, with the thousands, if not tens of thousands of oauth credentials checked in on public github repos, I don't really see that revoking access to one credential as a major bottle neck.
- A_COMPUTER 11y agoThe choke point seemed to me to be that they end up notifying you of it via...twitter. You can go to their site and still see deleted tweets. If you weren't putting them back up on Twitter, you could easily monitor politician tweets and never get caught by Twitter. How do archive sites and sites like Storify get away with storing deleted tweets? Storify even lets you repost your stories on Twitter.