From Censorship Circumvention to Schizophrenic Streams of Thought

Shaken, Not Stirred

It’s been a crazy election year, and a lot of crazy stuff has been said by all sides. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of it all — who wants to bother having to check in on CNN or Fox News for the next big bombshell?

Twitter is great, but trying to reconcile who-said and when-said across multiple candidates isn’t easy.

What happens when you take all the presidential candidates (and their running mates) and bundle up everything they tweet into one Twitter account?

Comedy gold. Cringe-worthy moments. Deep thoughts. Random adverts. Every reaction you can think of!

Here’s an example exchange courtesy @PT_US_Prez2016:

Inspired by an article by Richard Vardit in the August 2016 edition of 2600 magazine, I went and built a program to merge different Twitter feeds together in a constantly updating, often-entertaining, sometimes-enlightening stream of thought.

No names, no context: just the tweets they tweet — these are the thoughts of our potential leaders whether they’re Democrat, Green, Libertarian, or Republican.

ParroTweet, as I’m calling it, has been done before. But as I read Richard’s article about the censorship the people of Argentina faced during the Kirchner presidency I came to understand how important it was to see the “unfiltered view.”

From his article:

By the end of 2014, I discovered the President had blocked me on Twitter on her official account: @CFKArgentina. It is as unfair as it sounds: I couldn’t see what the president of my country was tweeting, nor reply, retweet, or even quote. After some research (by that I mean a Twitter search: “@CFKArgentina blocked me”), I found that many more people were in the same situation.

In Argentina’s case they faced a presidency that refused to hold press conferences, actively shut out journalists, and relied on a curated list of Twitter followers to mobilize action.

If you weren’t on the list, you had no say.

ParroTweet: How it Works

ParroTweet is a simple PHP app (written in a hour or so) that uses two Twitter accounts (and their associated API access credentials): a subscriber, and a broadcaster to create a merged stream of content.

The subscriber is responsible for following the “target friends” — this way if they block non-followers they still have access to their tweets; an account not directly associated with the broadcaster.

The broadcaster takes all the tweets since the last update, sorts them by their publish date and time, and tweets them anew in stream-of-thought style.

You can download the code on GitHub at the ParroTweet repo — it’s easy to get up and running. You’ll just need two create your Twitter accounts and visit https://apps.twitter.com for the access credentials.

It’s really just a toy project that had some fun results so I opened up the license: do whatever you’d like with it!

Why ParroTweet? It’s more like a parrot than a tweet.

But Wait, There’s More

You didn’t think I’d leave you in the cold once the election is over did you?

See the U.S. Congress(104 active Twitter members) in action: @PT_US_Congress