Article Image

IPFS News Link • Trump Administration

A New Site Tracks Trump's Twitter Blocking Spree

• https://www.wired.com

Donald Trump—or at the very least, someone with ready access to Donald Trump's Twitter account—has been blocking as many vocal critics as he can get his perfectly proportioned hands on. Now, a new web app built by former WIRED senior editor Kevin Poulsen shows not only exactly who these haters and losers are, but hopefully what their blocking could mean for our first amendment futures. Because if people make use of it, TrumpBlocks.me could be the definitive collection of everyone Donald Trump has blocked on Twitter.

Of course, blocking Twitter users isn't anything new for Trump; he's habitually frozen out critics and pests since long before he entered the Oval Office. But Trump isn't just a failed mail-order steak salesman anymore—he's the ruler of the free world. And when he does decide to take away citizens' abilities to engage with his daily onslaught of 140-character missives, he's potentially messing with the very same rights that keep us free in the first place. So when Poulsen heard about Trump's most recent round of high-profile blocks (think Stephen King), he decided to document the occasion with cold, hard data.

"It's fascinating that we live in a time when you might wake up in the morning and find that the Leader of the Free World has banned you from reading and commenting on what he says online," says Poulsen. "As a journalist and a geek, I hate taking things on faith, and I hate guesswork and rough estimates and anecdotal information. I love evidence and numbers."

So Poulsen isn't just taking people's words for it. Instead, he's using Twitter's API both to confirm that Trump actually blocked the user in question, and to monitor changes in their status. Once a blockee clicks the "I'm Blocked" button on the TrumpBlocks.me homepage, a popup appears asking for read-only access to their Twitter account. "That means the app can't post tweets on behalf of the user, and it can't see direct messages. But it does see other people's timelines with whatever restrictions that user's account is under," Poulsen explains.


Agorist Hosting