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https://github.com/travisbrown/cancel-culture

Tools for fighting abuse on Twitter
https://github.com/travisbrown/cancel-culture

twitter-api wayback-machine

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Tools for fighting abuse on Twitter

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README 

        
## Overview



[![Build status](https://img.shields.io/github/actions/workflow/status/travisbrown/cancel-culture/ci.yaml?branch=main)](https://github.com/travisbrown/cancel-culture/actions)

[![Coverage status](https://img.shields.io/codecov/c/github/travisbrown/cancel-culture/main.svg)](https://codecov.io/github/travisbrown/cancel-culture)



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](https://meta.plasm.us/posts/2020/07/25/response-to-john-de-goes/).



See [this related project](https://github.com/travisbrown/deleted-tweets) 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](https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Lambdaconf_incident), Stop the Steal, etc.),

or [this project](https://github.com/travisbrown/evasion) focused on tracking ban evasion by far-right accounts,

or [this recent project](https://github.com/salcoast/deleted-tweets-archive) by

[Salish Coast Anti-Fascist Action](https://twitter.com/SalishcoastA).



## Testimonials



[A Twitter user](https://web.archive.org/web/20210930150828/https://twitter.com/gringovice/status/1443551046823989256):



> Still, he somehow has access to everything you’ve ever posted & deleted, and can seemingly immediately find your new alt/resurrect/punished accounts.



## Terms of service compliance



This software is designed to promote use that is compliant with the Twitter API

[Developer Agreement](https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/agreement-and-policy)

and the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/)'s [Terms of Use](https://archive.org/about/terms.php).



Text and metadata for Twitter statuses are retrieved from the [Wayback Machine][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.



## Examples



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](https://www.scala-lang.org) 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][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](https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/9ca0dafe086e4904480b91d5019de96d).



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 



USAGE:

    twcc [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] 



FLAGS:

    -h, --help       Prints help information

    -v, --verbose    Level of verbosity

    -V, --version    Prints version information



OPTIONS:

    -k, --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

```



## Tweet screenshots



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:





Liking Scala is not a personality but it does mean you're racist / Do I think this is 100% accurate or fair: no … Do I think the Scala community is capable of coming to terms with the behavior that got it this reputation: also no




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](https://chromedriver.chromium.org/) running (it also works with GeckoDriver,

but the results don't look as nice).



## Setup



You'll need to [install Rust and Cargo](https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/getting-started/installation.html).



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](https://developer.twitter.com/en/apply-for-access)

for your Twitter account, and you'll need to provide the necessary keys in a file (by default

`keys.toml`):



```toml

[twitter]

consumerKey = "****"

consumerSecret = "****"

accessToken = "****"

accessTokenSecret = "****"

```



Some of the other tools require a [WebDriver](https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/) server instead of

API access. These should work with either [ChromeDriver](https://chromedriver.chromium.org/) or

[GeckoDriver](https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver).



## Other



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.



## License



This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for details.



[wayback-machine]: https://web.archive.org/