TWITTER DOWNLOAD ARCHIVE ARCHIVE
The LoC archive could have provided a master dataset to this critical effort.īoth these examples relate to our current needs. While methods to analyse the activities of Twitter accounts have much improved in recent years, access to the large-scale datasets to which such methods could be applied remains the major bottleneck. But in the absence of a comprehensive dataset on contemporary social media activities, each is picking only at a handful of strands of the network, and there is a real sense that the bot-herding information warriors behind it all remain one step beyond those who would seek to stop them.Ī comprehensive, all-inclusive Twitter Archive in the shape initially envisaged by the Library of Congress would have provided a major boost to such efforts to protect public debate from outside manipulation. Many research projects around the world are now attempting to unravel the networks and activities of the accounts engaged in such practices, on Twitter and elsewhere. Their mis- and disinformation, their ‘fake news’, their ‘computational propaganda’, has been implicated in the context of the Brexit referendum and various national elections. Acting in unison and controlled by nefarious state and commercial actors, these accounts are suspected of seeking to affect the public perception of particular issues and individuals. Similarly, well beyond the United States there is considerable concern at present about the role of fake and automated accounts on Twitter and other social media platforms. An impartial public service institution like the Library of Congress is inherently best-placed to address that task whether the LoC’s much-reduced approach to archiving selected tweets can still achieve it remains unclear. More specifically, some analysts following the Mueller probe into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian operatives have already pointed to Trump’s tweets as a potential admission of obstruction of justice.Ĭlearly, the tweets posted by and other accounts associated both with the administration itself and with its political opponents in Congress and beyond must be preserved for further study in the shorter and longer term. The President’s use of Twitter is as famous as it is infamous, and the status of his tweets as official government statements remains a matter of debate. The project’s end creates substantial concerns both for present analysts and for future historians.Įxhibit A: Donald J. Released on Boxing Day, in a period where public scrutiny of official announcements is generally limited, news of the project’s failure arrives at a time when Twitter’s public and political importance has never been greater. Twitter’s announcement of its gift to the Library of Congress, in April 2010