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Archive of 43k+ Donald Trump Twitter Screenshots (pikaso.me)
94 points by soheilpro on Jan 9, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 31 comments


Searchable text archive with CSV/JSON export here - https://www.thetrumparchive.com

No affiliation to that site, just found it useful.


I only wish that the site had permalinks (not to Twitter, but to the archived links themselves).


It’s on GitHub[1] so I’m sure the author will welcome an issue or even better a PR.

[1] https://github.com/bpb27/tta-elastic


It's unfortunate that all those permalinks to his old tweets are dead. A lot of other tweets, blog posts, and news articles are now broken.


This (and going private in Twitter) is the reason BBC uses screenshots instead of direct embeds (the link is still on the text and/or caption).


The problem there is that it's easy to fake a tweet via an image. Not a big problem for the BBC since they're fairly trustworthy.


Wished a lot more outlets did this because Twitter embeds rarely load for me on mobile. For ex in Apple News or Safari any Twitter embeds are just a spinning loading wheel of death


It doesn't universally solve the problem, but a given platform or website might be able to make changes to rewrite links to include the archive.org prefix to make them functional again.

Still requires work, but perhaps a tiny step in making them somewhat accessible again.


You could probably fix that with a small userscript, if so inclined.


Front and center should be the one where he says they are coming for you, he’s just in the way.


Someone was just waiting for this day to come. Archive all that BS for analytical purposes and let's hopefully all move on.


Analytical purposes AKA evidence in forthcoming legal proceedings.


It turns out things online don't exist forever.

There are lots of things that are deleted and are impossible to find afterwards because somebody has to archive it and at some point that "somebody" stops caring. So when things like the service they used to host the content clear up old content, things don't get reuploaded.

I really hope that these tweets are not only stored, but stored in a way that makes it difficult to prevent manipulation. I think many of Trump's tweets (and his family) are historic. Hopefully they're archived in a way that they last decades/centuries.


Seems like a waste of disk space to archive all those tweets from the Stable Genius. I guess that will have to do as his "presidential library"?


Why would anyone archive a Twitter feed as images? Like really? The whole thing should just be in a text file.


I personally have been archiving Trump's tweets in a SQL like database. https://www.dolthub.com/repositories/alexis-evelyn/president...


> This page is not currently supported on mobile browsers

> Please visit this page on a desktop computer.

That’s unfortunate...


Yep. It's a work in progress. Currently Dolthub's team is focused on improving the speed and efficiency of the software. Mobile support for the website is on the roadmap.


> Today, we are releasing the resulting files to the public. This archive contains screenshots of 43,475 Donald Trump tweets from May 2009 to May 2020.

Does anyone have any insight as to why the tweets are archived as screenshots, as opposed to text?

> (Direct download, 2.6 GB)

Assuming each tweet plus its associated metadata is roughly ~500 bytes, then the 43k tweets in text form would be approximately 22 megabytes. The images are 2.6 gigabytes.


Pikaso is a tool for taking screenshots of tweets and this was probably done as a showcase of the tool.


You’re just rephrasing the original question. Ok so why would someone design a tool that takes screenshots if tiny blurbs of text? It truly boggles the mind.


What speaks against having such a tool? I'm thinking of news sites that want to give their readers the impression of the original tweet without embedding the remote content. This would've avoided the current situation where many articles are useless because the tweets they discuss are no longwr available.

Okay, maybe a bit of CSS could do the same. But this requires someone to change the CSS. Adding an image can be done by any journalist and is mostly risk-free. You cannot break the looks of other articles this way.

This, of course, is only to argue why such a tool exists.


I think this comes down to some brilliant twitter marketing. They pushed the idea that to cover tweets you need to convey the look of tweets, which at a minimum pushes their brand, but also lets them embed trackers all over the web.

For any other medium an article can just quote the content.


Screenshots are for some reason to be better proof than just text? I think it's a layman's fallacy.


Literally right click, inspect, edit


...and then screenshot the editied tweet? Op’s point is (i think) that there is no more verifiability to a screenshot than to the text itself.

Not from the perspective of verifiability, but from the perspective of showing them as they were seen in the moment (fonts, profile icons, layout) screenshots do seem a touch more historically accurate


Did they stop collecting at some point?

As they just permabanned him, it'd be possible (and great) to have a complete archive, for history preservation.


looks like pikaso is a tool used for screenshotting tweets for usage on sites / other marketing. and this is a demo / marketing for their tool


Because screenshots are slightly harder to fake. If it were only text you could just type in the spreadsheet.


[flagged]


Theres a lot I don't know about the Soviet Union but the "Enemies of the People" were the leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, not supporters of the party.

I agree that people like Giuliani and even people like Ted Cruz who indirectly bolstered the attack on the capitol building should be prosecuted but going after Trump Supporters themselves is dumb and these comments shouldn't even be made in jest as they are quite dangerous. Most of them are victims of predatory media companies. You sound like the gestapo.


hmm, have you heard of Gulag and millions of 'enemies of the people' that perished there

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

also you didn't notice "/s", I'm a proud Trump voter, one of the 74M.




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