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Comment by eminence32 | Hacker News Reader

> Today, we are releasing the resulting files to the public. This archive contains screenshots of 43,475 Donald Trump tweets from May 2009 to May 2020.

Does anyone have any insight as to why the tweets are archived as screenshots, as opposed to text?

> (Direct download, 2.6 GB)

Assuming each tweet plus its associated metadata is roughly ~500 bytes, then the 43k tweets in text form would be approximately 22 megabytes. The images are 2.6 gigabytes.

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Pikaso is a tool for taking screenshots of tweets and this was probably done as a showcase of the tool.

You’re just rephrasing the original question. Ok so why would someone design a tool that takes screenshots if tiny blurbs of text? It truly boggles the mind.

What speaks against having such a tool? I'm thinking of news sites that want to give their readers the impression of the original tweet without embedding the remote content. This would've avoided the current situation where many articles are useless because the tweets they discuss are no longwr available.

Okay, maybe a bit of CSS could do the same. But this requires someone to change the CSS. Adding an image can be done by any journalist and is mostly risk-free. You cannot break the looks of other articles this way.

This, of course, is only to argue why such a tool exists.

I think this comes down to some brilliant twitter marketing. They pushed the idea that to cover tweets you need to convey the look of tweets, which at a minimum pushes their brand, but also lets them embed trackers all over the web.

For any other medium an article can just quote the content.

Screenshots are for some reason to be better proof than just text? I think it's a layman's fallacy.

Literally right click, inspect, edit

...and then screenshot the editied tweet? Op’s point is (i think) that there is no more verifiability to a screenshot than to the text itself.

Not from the perspective of verifiability, but from the perspective of showing them as they were seen in the moment (fonts, profile icons, layout) screenshots do seem a touch more historically accurate

Did they stop collecting at some point?

As they just permabanned him, it'd be possible (and great) to have a complete archive, for history preservation.

looks like pikaso is a tool used for screenshotting tweets for usage on sites / other marketing. and this is a demo / marketing for their tool

Because screenshots are slightly harder to fake. If it were only text you could just type in the spreadsheet.

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