How do you search timelines of those recently removed twitter accounts?

July 19, 2018 12:08 PM

So is there anywhere I can go to to search the accounts of the twitter bots that were recently taken down as part of the mass purge? I have a couple of theories about them and I'm hoping there's a shortcut out there.
posted by rileyray3000 to Technology (4 answers total)

While Twitter might keep an archive of that data somewhere, removed accounts and their posts aren't visible to users of the site by design. I don't see a way to get what you're after legitimately without a subpoena.
posted by Aleyn at 5:20 PM on July 19, 2018

Twitter combats against its stuff being crawled and archived, I believe. I've tried to find deleted accounts and deleted tweets and I never have luck. Even random crap sites like "Tweet Tunnel" and others (which I am convinced are just content mills designed to appear in Google searches) update very quickly and tend to show stuff in real time only. There was one a time when those sites would have old, deleted stuff but it hasn't been that way over last several years that I can recall.
posted by AppleTurnover at 5:56 PM on July 19, 2018

Do you know the old account names? you could try searching archive.org for http://twitter.com/accountName
posted by nalyd at 6:15 PM on July 19, 2018

Response by poster: So this is seeming like a no, short of a subpoena. That's too bad. I thought maybe I could search them to see if there are any keyword trends in the fake accounts.
posted by rileyray3000 at 9:14 PM on July 19, 2018