The original motivation for this project was a cease and desist letter that I received from John De Goes (a prominent conference organizer in the Scala community), who claims that I defamed him by quoting abusive and white-nationalist-friendly tweets that he had deleted. You can read more about that situation here.
We've currently published the following metadata:
The complete dataset now includes 25,007,143 distinct deleted or unavailable tweets, out of a total of 70,688,355 tweets from 5,201,866 accounts scraped from 42,696,221 Wayback Machine pages.
Please note that none of the content linked here or associated with this project was accessed directly from Twitter. All data was gathered from the Wayback Machine over several months, via the following steps:
- We choose a set of seed accounts, mostly representing far-right activists associated with LambdaConf, Gamergate, QAnon, etc.
- We use the Wayback Machine's CDX index to list all archived tweet URLs for these accounts.
- We download these archived pages (which are a mix of HTML and JSON) from the Wayback Machine, saving the Wayback Machine's "original" version of each page, together with the Wayback Machine's digest for that page.
- We parse these pages to extract information about individual tweets and Twitter accounts.
- We identify retweets, replies, and other relationships between accounts, and use these relationships to add new accounts to the download queue.
- We repeat these steps with the updated set of accounts.
Most of this process is automated using tools from the cancel-culture project.
We're planning to launch a full-text search interface for these deleted tweets in the next couple of months. In the meantime please contact me on Twitter if you're interested in getting access to the data or in generating deleted tweet reports for individual accounts.
The following list shows the current top 100 Twitter accounts by number of deleted or unavailable tweets.
71039 JackPosobiec
45286 infowars
44137 dotjenna
35837 ali
34924 RealAlexJones
33432 mattyglesias
33232 MorlockP
31643 Communism_Kills
30156 StefanMolyneux
29694 GrrrGraphics
26903 tracybeanz
26517 dbongino
26305 DVATW
23434 razibkhan
21707 getongab
21228 a_centrism
20659 metalliclown
20396 DrDavidDuke
20375 Glinner
19329 ChiefScientist
18418 AlwaysActions
18410 gatewaypundit
17295 Grummz
16899 realDonaldTrump
16567 Cernovich
16064 Carpedonktum
16005 qwertyplication
15998 DeAnna4Congress
14939 gwern
14590 va_shiva
13218 jonkay
12336 SidneyPowell1
12304 Styx666Official
12168 AndreVanDelft
11583 PepeMatter
11462 davidicke
10904 MAGAPILL
10899 AdamBaldwin
10378 WarRoomPandemic
10089 TeamTrump
9843 JAGKEV
9476 pegobry
9379 breaking911
9210 dysinger
8916 MaggieL
8564 mirriam71
8560 stillgray
8558 ExcludedMuddle
8530 NickJFuentes
8343 pnehlen
7764 Worried_Canuck
7654 spakhm
7619 JacobAWohl
7412 prezcannady
7391 mamendoza480
7225 larrydaliberal
7049 soulcookie322
6895 JesseKellyDC
6894 mitchellvii
6845 FaithGoldy
6768 RealWayneRoot
6569 JCompson_III
6363 LLinWood
6334 BluehandArea
6136 S___Elliott
6035 salvamedomine
5993 LeLook4
5916 johanatan
5845 RyanMaue
5815 johnroderick
5778 AlwaysACowboy
5595 Docstockk
5459 Austen
5412 TheMadDimension
5396 Project_Veritas
5075 TheHinduDindu
4869 SteveStuWill
4869 LauraLoomer
4604 LanaLokteff
4601 journalistew
4423 CelticWoman5
4402 Goy_Talk_USA
4298 drawandstrike
4167 Michael82379998
4122 Stalin_Groyper
3976 BoolinFool
3913 HumansOfFlat
3694 BrianKolfage
3687 Cinderwooded
3522 laikasrefectory
3514 philderome
3431 rooshv
3421 RichardTBurnett
3412 CassandraRules
3234 CanAditude
3200 PereGrimmer
3162 CodeMonkeyZ
3137 hawk_cloud
3122 jondelarroz
3091 peterboghossian