Inspiration
Inspired by the lack of internet access due to government censorship during protests for democracy in Belarus, where the government shut down the state's cellular internet in the hopes of disrupting communications between protestors. The organizations responsible for the peaceful protests faced significant challenges in organizing and assembling protests due to the lack of channels for communicating stemming from the unjust censorship, one of these channels includes Twitter.
What it does
'Igor' can receive an SMS from any number (currently within Canada and US only) with an account username and a desired date, and reply with all tweets from that account over the given timeframe.
How we built it
Having done some intense research, the team has come up with an idea to use Twilio as the main "bridge" between short message service (sms) and the internet, and Twint to extract required information from Twitter.
Challenges we ran into
Since all team members had almost no experience in working with Python, we had to learn its features and syntax while bringing 'Igor' into life. Moreover, we had to implement a connection via Twilio service, which took more time than expected, including additional research for the platform.
Accomplishments that we are proud of
Most of the project was completed using the "pair programming" technique, which turned to be very productive and engaging. In addition, we gained valuable experience coding in Python, which turned out to be very intuitive and useful to extract web date. Lastly, we are very proud to design 'Igor' as a team. We hope that this tool would see real world implementation and alleviate some of the challenges faced by protestors around the world, including the Belarusian protests, Hong Kong protests, and the BLM movement. We hope to continue a practice of developing projects as a team in the future.
What we learned
Apart from the technical knowledge gained, the team has learned to efficiently work together by breaking the project into smaller tasks, constantly communicating and collaborating with each. We have also learned how to code in Python and implement API's to fit our needs.
What's next for SMS Twitter Bot 'Igor'
Data extraction from Telegram channels is the next step for 'Igor'. We are hoping to teach 'Igor' to work with both Telegram and Twitter, as they are some of the most popular information sources in the world and is the main channel of communication for protests groups in Europe and Asia to organize and plan.
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