This repository is currently being used to coordinate work on the Hassreden-Tracker project. This means that for the immediate future the issue tracker will be the most interesting part of this repository, although eventually some code will be migrated here.
The project builds on several existing open source projects that I maintain (all of which rely on other open source projects):
- cancel-culture: Tools for Twitter archiving, indexing, and block list management.
- wayback-rs: Rust library for working with the Wayback Machine.
- twitter-watch: Reports about screen name changes and suspensions.
- twitter-tracker: Services that produce the twitter-watch reports (currently private).
- evasion: Report tracking far-right ban evasion accounts.
- egg-mode-extras: Rate-limit-aware asynchronous streams for working with the Twitter API.
- orcrs: Apache ORC file reading library for Rust.
- hkvdb: A key-value store interface built on RocksDB.
- twpis: Twitter profile image collection.
- memory.lol: A web service providing historical Twitter account information (currently private).
- stop-the-steal: 9.7 million profile snapshots for Twitter users associated with the Stop the Steal movement.
- octocrabby: Block list management for GitHub accounts.
Washington Post (19 April 2022; archived)
On Saturday, software developer Travis Brown (who is working on a project with support from Prototype Fund, an organization that backs open-source projects) unearthed the account’s Twitter history and posted a thread detailing information about its profile changes.
Australian Financial Review (30 September 2022; archived)
On head office advice, Deves deactivated her Twitter account and started studying the party’s policy platform. Both actions were pointless. Her entire social media history had already been captured by a Berlin online activist called Travis Brown.
The Information (31 October 2022; archived)
The trend was short-lived. By October people began quietly removing the suffix from their Twitter names. At least 16,000 Twitter accounts got rid of it between February and October, according to an analysis conducted by programmer Travis Brown and provided to The Information.
Washington Post (16 November 2022; archived)
A large portion of the most-followed accounts that got “verified” via Twitter Blue, according to the data reviewed by The Post, are from a few specific subcommunities on Twitter: pornography, cryptocurrency advocates and overseas accounts, particularly from the Middle East. The data was compiled by Berlin software developer Travis Brown and reviewed and verified by The Post.
Brown has developed several tools for monitoring extremists online. He told Hatewatch in a telephone conversation that the latest version of the list shows accounts that have paid for blue checks ranked “by their centrality in far-right Twitter networks,” so that accounts with more connections with other far-right accounts receive a higher ranking in the list.
New York Times (23 November 2022; archived)
The plan had attracted about 140,000 users as of Nov. 15, according to data from Travis Brown, a software developer in Berlin who has studied extremism on Twitter.
Business Insider (24 November 2022; archived)
Brown's data showed that thousands of subscribers were linked to around 5,000 far-right Twitter accounts that had been flagged for pushing extremist ideas and some were also listed by Cornell University for posting conspiracy theories about election fraud.
Travis Brown was able to connect the accounts by using scraped Discord data that showed the @vrilgod account was connected to a network of overlapping usernames and posts, many of which identified new accounts as belonging to the owner of previously banned accounts.
Travis Brown, an independent software developer in Berlin who tracks Twitter suspensions and screen name changes as part of a project studying extremism, shared a dataset for this article that showed a wide variety of far-right accounts had been reinstated since Musk’s announcement.
A data set of many of the unbanned accounts compiled by researcher and software developer Travis Brown, who worked for Twitter for a year in 2014 and last year began a project tracking hate speech on the platform, shows dozens of users who have had their bans reversed are using QAnon-related phrases or hashtags in their account bios.
MIT Technology Review (15 December 2022; archived)
According to data compiled by researcher Travis Brown, others reinstated include Meninist, a “men’s rights” account with more than a million followers; Peter McCullough, a cardiologist who gained a large audience for advocating discredited covid-19 treatments and arguing against receiving the vaccine; and Tim Gionet, a far-right media personality who livestreamed his participation in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
D’après les données compilées par le chercheur Travis Brown, parmi les autres personnes réintégrées on retrouve Meninist, un compte défendant les "droits des hommes" qui compte plus d’un million d’abonnés…
Media Matters (16 December 2022; archived)
In a new study, Media Matters analyzed independent software developer Travis Brown’s data sets that were released between December 7 and 13 and include recently reinstated Twitter accounts.
New York Times (22 December 2022; archived)
The posts were collected for The Times by Bright Data, a social media tracking company, using a list of reinstated users identified by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer who has tracked extremism on Twitter.
They noted screenshots of a Twitter account shaya_ray, which software developer Travis Brown identified in April to be associated with Raichik, appeared to show her describing heading to DC that day.
Wall Street Journal (10 February 2023; archived)
Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer, in late January estimated total subscribers to be between 275,000 and 325,000, based on computer programs that reviewed roughly 30 million accounts.
Most code is written in the Rust programming language. I've chosen to build this software primarily in Rust for a couple of reasons:
- The values of the Rust community tend to align with mine.
- Rust's focus on performance is especially valuable for projects operated by organizations or individuals with limited resources.
On the second point: almost all of the tools and services below can be run effectively on the smallest and cheapest Amazon Web Services EC2 instances, for example.
We aim for all of the projects above to be compliant with the terms of service of any platform that they access.
In most cases data is collected from open public archives and other public resources, such as Archive Today, the Wayback Machine, and the Internet Archive's Twitter Stream Grab.
Some of these projects do make limited use of platform APIs (e.g. the Twitter API). This includes collecting, archiving, and publishing public follower relationships, platform IDs, content status (e.g. whether a tweet is deleted or not), and screen names.
Specifically, none of the tools above currently store tweets accessed through the Twitter API. If at some point we support archiving or publishing tweets accessed through the Twitter API, we will respect the deletion requirements of the Twitter API terms of service.
All code and data is made publicly available except in cases where this would undermine the core project goals or the privacy or safety of project members.
Most of these projects are published under the Mozilla Public License. Some projects that could be misused for commercial surveillance are published under the Anti-Capitalist Software License.
Rust libraries are published to crates.io, a widely-used Rust package registry.