Hassreden-Tracker

This repository is currently being used to coordinate work on the Hassreden-Tracker project. This means that for the immediate future the issue tracker will be the most interesting part of this repository, although eventually some code will be migrated here.

Projects

The project builds on several existing open source projects that I maintain (all of which rely on other open source projects):

• cancel-culture: Tools for Twitter archiving, indexing, and block list management.
• wayback-rs: Rust library for working with the Wayback Machine.
• twitter-watch: Reports about screen name changes and suspensions.
• twitter-tracker: Services that produce the twitter-watch reports (currently private).
• evasion: Report tracking far-right ban evasion accounts.
• egg-mode-extras: Rate-limit-aware asynchronous streams for working with the Twitter API.
• orcrs: Apache ORC file reading library for Rust.
• hkvdb: A key-value store interface built on RocksDB.
• twpis: Twitter profile image collection.
• memory.lol: A web service providing historical Twitter account information (currently private).
• stop-the-steal: 9.7 million profile snapshots for Twitter users associated with the Stop the Steal movement.
• octocrabby: Block list management for GitHub accounts.

Principles

Technical

Most code is written in the Rust programming language. I've chosen to build this software primarily in Rust for a couple of reasons:

• The values of the Rust community tend to align with mine.
• Rust's focus on performance is especially valuable for projects operated by organizations or individuals with limited resources.

On the second point: almost all of the tools and services below can be run effectively on the smallest and cheapest Amazon Web Services EC2 instances, for example.

Terms of service compliance

We aim for all of the projects above to be compliant with the terms of service of any platform that they access.

In most cases data is collected from open public archives and other public resources, such as Archive Today, the Wayback Machine, and the Internet Archive's Twitter Stream Grab.

Some of these projects do make limited use of platform APIs (e.g. the Twitter API). This includes collecting, archiving, and publishing public follower relationships, platform IDs, content status (e.g. whether a tweet is deleted or not), and screen names.

Specifically, none of the tools above currently store tweets accessed through the Twitter API. If at some point we support archiving or publishing tweets accessed through the Twitter API, we will respect the deletion requirements of the Twitter API terms of service.

Licensing and distribution

All code and data is made publicly available except in cases where this would undermine the core project goals or the privacy or safety of project members.

Most of these projects are published under the Mozilla Public License. Some projects that could be misused for commercial surveillance are published under the Anti-Capitalist Software License.

Rust libraries are published to crates.io, a widely-used Rust package registry.