Tweet compliance

One of Twitter’s core values is to defend and respect the user’s voice. This includes respecting their expectations and intent when they delete or modify the content they choose to share on Twitter. We believe that this is critically important to the long term health of one of the largest public, real-time information platforms in the world. Twitter puts controls in the hands of its users, giving individuals the ability to control their own Twitter experience. We believe that business consumers that receive Twitter data have a responsibility to honor the expectations and intent of end users.

For more information on the types of compliance events that are possible on the Twitter platform, reference our article, Honoring User Intent on Twitter.

Any developer or company consuming Twitter data via an API holds an obligation to use all reasonable efforts to honor changes to user content. This obligation extends to user events such as deletions, modifications, and changes to sharing options (e.g., content becoming protected or withheld). Please reference the specific language in the Developer Policy and/or your Twitter Data Agreement to understand how this obligation affects your use of Twitter data.

Twitter offers the following solutions that deliver information about these user compliance events and whether a specific Tweet or User is publicly available or not. A brief overview of the solutions and their general integration patterns is detailed below:

GET statuses/lookup and GET users/lookup

  • Format: REST API’s See: GET statuses/lookup and GET users/lookup
  • Deliver availability information for specific Tweets or Users as defined by the caller as part of the API request
  • May be used for ad-hoc spot-checking on the current availability state of a specific group of Tweets / Users
  • Ideal for customers who need a way to check the current state of a specific Tweet or User at a given moment in time
  • These API’s provide a helpful mechanism that may be used by customers who need to check the availability of a piece of Content, for instance when:
    1. Displaying Tweets
    2. Engaging with a Tweet(s) or User(s) in a 1:1 way
    3. Distributing Twitter Content to a 3rd party through an allowed file download
    4. Storing Tweets for extended periods of time

Compliance Firehose (enterprise only)

  • Format: Streaming API See: Compliance Firehose
  • Delivers realtime stream of Compliance activities on Twitter
  • May be used to maintain compliance state across a set of stored data as new compliance events happen on the platform
  • Ideal for customers consuming and storing large quantities of Twitter data for extended periods of time