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posted by on Saturday February 04 2017, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the tweeting-twits dept.

President Donald J. Trump loves his Twitter account. Much has been made of Trump's 140-character missives, which he at least in part blasts out to the world unfiltered with his own fingers (and sometimes his staff). Interpreting the data and metadata of Trump's tweets has become akin to a modern form of Kremlinology­—the art of reading the temperature of the Soviet Union's leadership by noting who was seated where in the reviewing stands at Red Square.

Twitter may not be the leading social media platform, and it may not be the friendliest place on Earth to exchange ideas. But it does offer an API that lets pretty much anyone mine its metadata. While much of the data associated with tweets is obscured by the usual Twitter clients, those who've followed the tweeting travails of our 45th president are likely aware of the fact that it contains information like what device or software tweets were posted from. In the past, Law enforcement agencies and others have used access to Twitter metadata for a variety of purposes, including surveillance, by tapping into high-volume feeds of Twitter's tweet-stream. But a great deal of information can be gathered with much simpler and accessible tools.

"As any other social media website Twitter know a lot of things about you, thanks [to] metadata," a French security researcher known as X0rz wrote in a recent blog post. "Indeed, for a 140 characters message you will get A LOT of metadata—more than 20 times the size of the initial content you typed in! And guess what? Almost all of this metadata is accessible through the open Twitter API." To demonstrate that, X0rz wrote a Python script called tweets_analyzer, a command-line tool to tap into some of Twitter's vast metadata that may not be accessible from the standard client.

Tweets_analyzer requires a Twitter account for authentication, as well as Twitter API credentials and, of course, a tweaked Python environment. It's not exactly something to be handed over blindly to the average tweeter. But in the right hands (and with a little patience due to Twitter API rate-limiting), it can help analyze accounts to identify networks of Twitter bots or trolls concealing their actual location and identity. In addition to examining the metadata associated with Twitter users and their tweets, X0rz added a "friends" analysis feature that skims information from the metadata of the accounts followed by the target account, including language, timezone and location data.

For the sake of science, I turned tweets_analyzer loose on a few Twitter accounts to see what sort of information I could uncover. I started with the most obvious of suspects: Donald Trump.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/dont-tweet-new-tool-gives-insight-into-whos-behind-twitter-eggs-and-trolls/


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 05 2017, @03:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 05 2017, @03:40AM (#463008)

    > So he tweets while on the tarmac ...

    Have you heard what the secret service have to say if they spot a potential threat?
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    Donald duck.

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