Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Tweet URL:  https://twitter.com/derekwillis/status/1127234631865118731 On May 11th 2019, Derek Willis , who works at Propublica and also maintains the Politwoops project, tweeted a list of deleted tweet ids found by Politwoops that could not be attributed to any Twitter handle being tracked by Politwoops. This was an opportunity for us to revisit our interest in  using web archives to uncover the deleted tweets . Although we were unsuccessful in finding  any of the deleted tweet ids  in web archives  provided by Politwoops, we are documenting our process for coming to this conclusion. Politwoops    Politwoops is a web service which tracks deleted tweets of elected public officials and candidates running for office in the USA and 55 other countries . The Politwoops USA is supported by  Propublica . Creating Twitter handles list for the 116th Congress  In a  previous post , we discussed the challenges involved in creating a data set of Twitter handles for

Figure 1: Screenshot from TweetedAt service showing timestamp for a  deleted tweet from @SpeakerPelosi Memento Link:  http://web.archive.org/web/20170905173455/https:/twitter.com/nancypelosi?lang=da On  May 11, 2019,  Derek Willis from Politwoops shared a list of deleted tweet IDs  which could not be attributed to any Twitter handle followed by them. We tried multiple techniques to find the list of deleted tweet IDs in the web archives, but we were unsuccessful in finding any of the tweet IDs in web archives within the time range of our analysis. During our  investigation, we learned of Snowflake, a service used to generate unique IDs by Twitter. We used Snowflake to extract the timestamp from the deleted tweet IDs. Of  the 107 deleted tweet IDs shared with us only seven of them were in the time range of our initial analysis . In this post, we describe TweetedAt , a web service and library to extract the timestamps for post-Snowflake IDs and estimate timestamps for pre

Took screen shot, just in case, but I fear #Breitbart is well beyond the point of decency and shame that they would delete this insane tweet. #INTL4335 #Islamophobia pic.twitter.com/ipo1MhDmNI — Cas Mudde 🌪️ (@CasMudde) February 5, 2018 In early February, 2018  Breitbart News  made a splash with its inflammatory tweet suggesting  Muslims will end Super Bowl ,  which they deleted twelve hours later stating it did not meet their editorial standards. The deleted tweet had an imaginary conversation between a Muslim child and a grandparent about the Super Bowl and linked to one of articles on the  declining TV ratings of  National Football League (NFL) for the annual championship game . News articles from  The Hill , Huffington Post , Politico , Independent , etc., talked about the deleted tweet controversy in detail.  We have deleted a tweet that did not meet our editorial standards. — Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) February 5, 2018 Being web