Library of Congress To Receive Entire Twitter Archive 106
An anonymous reader writes "The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents. 'We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,' said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information."
Even deleted ones? (Score:5, Interesting)
I deleted my Twitter account and it's been 30 days. Does Twitter still keep those tweets for posterity on their servers through some manner of legal acrobatics?
Re:Even deleted ones? (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped selling the book I wrote and it's been 30 days. May the world still have copies of it through some manner of legal acrobatics?
Once you have published something, you cannot expect to be able to pull it back.
Re:Even deleted ones? (Score:4, Insightful)
Twitter says they're going to delete it after thirty days. There's a marked difference between 'delete' and 'archive'. I have no issue if someone cut and pasted the last 3200 tweets from my Twitter account but the fact Twitter says they'll delete the tweets, not archive them, is deceptive.
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Twitter says they're going to delete it after thirty days.
No they don't.
From the Twitter FAQs [twitter.com].
- RG>
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Anonymous Coward had a Twitter account? Huh, never knew that.
https://twitter.com/#!/AnoCow404 [twitter.com]
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That, and also what about the attached or linked images?
Would love to see Hayley Williams' (Paramore) accidentally tweeted pic of her tits archived for "research" by future generations.
http://theinternettoday.net/pics/hayley-williams-nude-tweet-mistake/ [theinternettoday.net]
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Legal acrobatics? You published it! That means that anyone in the whole internet who asked for it, got it. There should be no more expectation that you can take that back than you should be able to stop people from remembering what you said out loud. Less. Twitter themselves couldn't take it back if they wanted to.
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Old News (Score:5, Informative)
This happened more than a year ago!!!!!
http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/ [loc.gov]
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It was even posted on Slashdot [slashdot.org].
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I think your tweets will disappear faster if you send them a DMCA notice and threaten to sue their pants off.
Some pastebin links to legally hot material have mysteriously gone 404.
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I guess that's why the call it a FAQ:
"Private account information and deleted tweets will not be part of the archive."
http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/the-library-and-twitter-an-faq/
Any from anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it's in their TOS that you lose all rights to the IP contained in a given tweet, this will more than guarantee some lawsuits from some very large groups.
Re:Any from anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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IIRC corporates have sued over confidential information that was recorded on unlisted (but still public!) satellite channels.
I think the DNC may have also took action over the Clinton video that appears in Spin (long before, of course), but I can't remember exactly.
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No, you don't lose "Intellectual Property". You just gave non exclusive right for Twitter, and everybody else, to distribute your "intellectual Property". But it's still yours.
Then again, given twitter's size limit, it's not protected under the general interpretation of copyright. It's only 160 characters.
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Twitter is only 140 characters, actually.
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Twitter can still be served with a DMCA takedown notice.
Imagine if someone tweeted the PS3 root keys?
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But if all of it so far is going into public domain (perhaps I'm wrong on that point, I really don't know) then there's nothing to takedown?
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It's not on public domain just because it gets posted to twitter.
Copyrighted content remains copyrighted no matter where you post it.
Slapping something on twitter that wasn't yours to begin with doesn't magically make it subject to twitter's terms. You have violated the implied warranty of authority by attempting to act without the permission of the copyright holder as their agent.
Which means you get busted for infringement and your rogue post to twitter gets taken down in compliance with the DMCA. It's n
Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)
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Same with the previous generations and Usenet, heck even slashdot archive everything, just face up to it, if you don't want your comments to be online forever, don't upload them in the first place! the RIAA and MPAA is having to learn this the hard way.
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...now the inane mumblings and poor grammar of the Twitter Age will be remembered throughout history. I was kinda hoping we'd eventually be able to forget all of this ever happened.
Obligatory inane comment about wasted taxpayer money.
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Sure, why not. A historical rune inscription that I am rather fond of reads
"oli er oskeyndr auk strodhinn i rassinn",
which apparently means roughly "Oli has been taken in his unwiped ass."
We tend to think of the study of history as a dignified, if not outright dull pursuit, but there's a lot of vulgarity there, in both senses.
I'm sure that seen with the hindsight of twenty years, or of a hundred years, the texts on Twitter will have a very distinctive feel of the decade about them. And I think that as long
yes, but... (Score:2)
Re:yes, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
By itself probably a lot, but remember it's mostly text. They'll be able to compress the hell out of it.
Re:yes, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Hopefully they compress it down to 1 bit.
Re:yes, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully they compress it down to 1 bit.
And the value of that bit is "0".
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SIZE=$(stat -c%s $1)
while [ $SIZE -gt 1 ]
do
gzip -c $1 > $1
SIZE=$(stat -c%s $1)
done
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Less than one, obviously, since the LoC will contain that plus other stuff. ;-)
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unknown, however the library of congress will be increased by approximately 1.5 libraries of congress.
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So how do we measure the amount of data on anything as compared to the library of congress now that the size has changed?!?!? All previous measurements now have to be remeasured using the new Library of Congress size model.
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Hum... On standard measuring conventions, it'll take exactly one Library of Congress.
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How much space will this take up?
I hope NONE. Otherwise they'll screw up my standard unit of measure: Libraries of Congress.
Pooping (Score:5, Funny)
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Uh.... fart?
Results are in (Score:5, Funny)
Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information.
Nothing interesting was found.
This begs one simple question (Score:3, Funny)
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Because it's a great documentation of early online society.
Plus there is a ton of social and behavioral data to be found.
I know it's hip to poo-poo twitter on /., but the vast majority of users are normal people with fine spelling tweeting about things that interest them.
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So future generations can look back on the golden age of the internet when everybody was talking and nobody was listening.
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Simple: joke material for your grandchildren!
#n hashtag is supposed to help (Score:1)
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They offer a service. If people didn't want the twits....tweets to be public they shouldn't use it.
I'm not sure what all the hellabalu is anyways, overall, this is a good thing.
Time to put on my tinfoil hat (Score:5, Insightful)
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wait, you vote for not storing public information?
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It's called "the anonymity of the crowd." If you think about it, following you around in a public place is called stalking for that reason. You have a right to go about your public business without undue and/or unwanted scrutiny, though less than you used to.
It's the same with the tweets - you agreed to post them for people to read in near-real time, not to be fodder for people to look at "forever and ever, world without end, amen and pass the gravy."
There's also the problem of context, both literal
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First, the concept of "anonymity of the crowd" is protected by law in places like Canada. You know, places where the government isn't bought and sold so readily because of limits on political campaign financing ...
Second, nobody authorized twitter (or anyone else) to turn over the entire posting history to researchers.
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Don't be stupid. Twitter lets people delete their posts [twitter.com], but you can't do the same for the stuff that the LoC has archived.
People signed up with the understanding that they could remove tweets from the public record. Turns out twitter, in handing a copy to the library of congress to
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You really missed the point. This is an ongoing project that they started doing this over a year ago. If you deleted something 2 months ago that you posted 6 months before, they've still got it.
Dump them. It's the only way to be sure.
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Actually, there is. Example: Cyber-stalking is the net equivalent of stalking. Both are done in public, and both are illegal. Or are you going to argue that both forms of stalking has suddenly become legal?
Just because something is posted in a public forum does NOT give 3rd parties the right to use it beyond the original agreed-upon terms, and nowhere did anyone give express consent to let their posts be aggregated by some 3rd party, such as the Library of Congress. The LoC was not a party to any agre
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IT's public information. It has exactly NOTHING to do with privacy.
Let me know when twitter gives you the option for tweets to be private,and then gives out THAT information.
Idiot.
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That flamebait reply is also public. Image this: Some years later, you are going through an important job application process. The company you're wanting to get hired at queries your name in a "public" online records archive and they find this post where you rashly label someone an idiot and decide you are unfit to work for them because it gives the impression of a hot temper.
Or perhaps they don't even personally view the post, but it was factored into a kind of "personality score sheet" by a data mining
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People's diaries and letters are published all the time, especially after they're dead and no longer have a say in the matter. And those are things that aren't initially published in a public medium.
- RG>
Computational linguists rejoice (Score:1)
A wild corpus appears!
How big? (Score:2)
Re:How big? (Score:5, Funny)
well now that the Twitter archive is part of the Library of Congress it can only reflected as a portion of the Library of Congress.
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well now that the Twitter archive is part of the Library of Congress it can only reflected as a portion of the Library of Congress.
So does this mean we've invented the recursive unit?
Overheard in Russia (Score:2)
And nothing of value... (Score:2)
... was gained.
Great. (Score:2)
Great. Now the taxpayers are on the hook for Twitter's backup maintenance costs. Seriously. They don't even need their own storage anymore. I'm sure, since the Library of Congress is a publicly available entity, they'll have full access to the data-sets. They can just pipe everything straight to the LIB servers then access them at will, at any time. And who the fuck is paying for all that bandwidth?
Next we'll see the entire Facebook data-sets, Google cache data...
It must be April 1st somewhere (Score:2)
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No, it would be a joke if they were getting the abridged version of the tweets...
That drops the average value... (Score:2)
... of each unit of writing in said library by about half, I'd say.
I don't publish (Score:1)
You can have my 'tweets' when you pry my journal (it's not a diary Damnit!) from my cold dead hands.
I think I'll wait... (Score:2)
I think I will wait until Google Books scan it before I bother reading it ;)
Twitter Terms of Service (Score:3)
My first rule of the Internet (Score:1)