This repository contains some low-tech tools designed to help you make Twitter a nicer place for yourself. Some of these tools might also be useful in other ways, like for example if some litigious person with a long history of making common cause with white supremacists and misogynists threatens to sue you for defamation.
See this related project for an example of the kind of use case cancel-culture is designed to support (an archive of around 35 million deleted tweets associated with Gamergate, LambdaConf, Stop the Steal, etc.), or this project focused on tracking ban evasion by far-right accounts, or this recent project by Salish Coast Anti-Fascist Action.
Still, he somehow has access to everything you’ve ever posted & deleted, and can seemingly immediately find your new alt/resurrect/punished accounts.
This software is designed to promote use that is compliant with the Twitter API Developer Agreement and the Internet Archive's Terms of Use.
Text and metadata for Twitter statuses are retrieved from the Wayback Machine, not the Twitter API, which is primarily used here to list follower relationships and to allow users to import and export block lists.
In theory it's possible that there are ways you could violate the Developer Agreement with the help of this software (for example by using "information obtained from the Twitter API to target people with advertising outside of the Twitter platform"). Don't do that.
One of the things this project provides is a command-line tool that takes a Twitter screen name and outputs a list of all of the accounts you've blocked that that account follows (sorted here by follower count):
$ cargo build --release
Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.06s
$ target/release/twcc blocked-follows sfscala
@jdegoes 11807
@rolandkuhn 9238
@propensive 8323
@etorreborre 7045
@ChiefScientist 5450
@dibblego 3587
@nuttycom 3307
@kubukoz 2808
@scalaworldconf 2495
...
I get a lot of hate-follows, and this tool makes it much easier for me to decide which new followers I need to block. It's like a version of Twitter's "Followed by… and 123 others you follow" that's actually useful.
I sometimes work in a certain programming language community where prominent community members have a tendency to say abusive or exclusionary things and then delete and deny everything when they're confronted, so the CLI also provides a way to search the Wayback Machine for deleted tweets by a specified user:
$ target/release/twcc deleted-tweets --limit 100 jdegoes
https://web.archive.org/web/20190922222236/https://twitter.com/jdegoes/status/1170420726400212997
https://web.archive.org/web/20190923221242/https://twitter.com/jdegoes/status/1170711737361940481
https://web.archive.org/web/20200526150339/https://twitter.com/jdegoes/status/1265251872048320513
In this case we've limited the search to the 100 tweets most recently archived by the Wayback Machine.
You can also use this command to generate a Markdown-formatted report instead of a simple list of links:
$ target/release/twcc deleted-tweets --report ChiefScientist
Which currently generates this document.
It can also print a list of everyone you currently block, follow, or are followed by, it can get the URL of a deleted tweet from the URL of a reply, and it can partition a list of tweet IDs by their deleted status.
twcc 0.1.0
Travis Brown <[email protected]>
USAGE:
twcc [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <SUBCOMMAND>
FLAGS:
-h, --help Prints help information
-v, --verbose Level of verbosity
-V, --version Prints version information
OPTIONS:
-k, --key-file <key-file> TOML file containing Twitter API keys [default: keys.toml]
SUBCOMMANDS:
blocked-follows For a given user, list everyone they follow who you block
check-existence Checks whether a list of status IDs (from stdin) still exist
deleted-tweets Lists Wayback Machine URLs for all deleted tweets by a user
follower-report For a given user, print a report about their followers
help Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
import-blocks Blocks a list of user IDs (from stdin)
list-blocks Print a list of all users you've blocked
list-followers Print a list of all users who follow you (or someone else)
list-friends Print a list of all users you (or someone else) follows
list-tweets Print a list of (up to approximately 3200) tweet IDs for a user
lookup-reply Get the URL of a tweet given the URL or status ID of a reply
The twshoot command-line tool can take a screenshot of a tweet, given either a URL or status ID:
$ cargo build --release
Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.29s
$ target/release/twshoot https://twitter.com/travisbrown/status/1291256191641952256
And then you have a 1291256191641952256.png file in the current directory that looks like this:
The application also generates a -full.png image showing the entire browser screen. The image
sizes, output directory, etc. are configurable (see twshoot --help for details).
This tool doesn't require a Twitter API account, but you do have to have ChromeDriver running (it also works with GeckoDriver, but the results don't look as nice).
You'll need to install Rust and Cargo.
Once you've got those, you can run cargo build --release and the binaries will be available in the
target/release directory.
For the main twcc application, you'll need
Twitter API access
for your Twitter account, and you'll need to provide the necessary keys in a file (by default
keys.toml):
[twitter]
consumerKey = "****"
consumerSecret = "****"
accessToken = "****"
accessTokenSecret = "****"Some of the other tools require a WebDriver server instead of API access. These should work with either ChromeDriver or GeckoDriver.
The project also contains some other miscellaneous stuff, including a way to export your Twitter block list even if you don't have a Twitter API account, and a way to search the Wayback Machine even if the CDX server isn't working.
It doesn't currently include a few related tools I use regularly, including a way to block everyone who retweeted or favorited a given tweet, a bunch of stuff related to Wayback Machine ingestion and downloading, and some scripts that bundle some of the follower functionality into daily reports.
Most of these things are excluded for one of the following reasons:
- They're even more fragile than the stuff that's here now.
- I haven't ported them from Scala to Rust yet.
I might add some of them eventually.
Nothing here is very polished or robust. These applications don't keep track of rate limits in all cases, for example, so if you run out of requests for an endpoint, they may just crash, and you'll have to wait. I might try to smooth out some of these rough edges at some point, but it's unlikely.
This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for details.
