undressor

Inspiration

What is the benefit of all the unlimited communication and free speech if everyone is just talking crap and believe in it?

We need mechanisms to drive Twitter and other social networks back to where they started. To bring people together instead of dividing them!

Of course, one of the reasons was just to play around with the Twitter API V2 and participate in the hackathon.

But the real motivation was to develop a possible solution to the biggest challenge of all social networks. Uncontrolled spreading of MANIPULATION and hate speech!

Social networks like Twitter have brought the world together and given all of us unprecedented freedom of speech. Everyone can express their opinion, really EVERYONE. It's a great thing!

But it is also a problem. There are people who are not interested in freedom of speech, but in deliberate manipulation. Or they simply want to spread hate and agitation. There are also people who unwittingly spread half-truths because they don't know any better. Either way, today's social networks are designed for the ultimate freedom of speech and offer practically no mechanisms to prevent abuse. There is no balance between freedom and anarchy.

Undressor is an attempt to create exactly this balance in the Twitter universe.

The basic idea of Undressor is based on a self-regulating mechanism that provides more transparency. Anyone can request the bot to learn more about the interests and activities of the authors. The analysis will be graphically processed and posted as an answer in the thread for everyone visible. This has 2 effects:

you yourself, but also the other users learn interesting insights about the author and can much better classify the content.
authors who deliberately manipulate or spread hate speech would have less success finding supporters through this transparency. E.g. because an account is recognized as a bot due to non-stop activity. Or because the hashtag/keyword analysis proves a clearly radical attitude.

Undressor does not judge, it just makes the hidden information visible and understandable for everyone. Users can read this information and make their own judgment!

purpose

We asked ourselves what current challenges the Twitter developer community is dealing with. To do this, we researched various ranking lists of the best Twitter bots. Here are some of those sources:

There you can find many bots and solutions that help to get more reach. Among the TOP 10 are also bots like: @year_progress, @emojimashupbot, or also @StupidCounter. We think that the social impact of these bots is not very big.

We haven't found a single solution that addresses truly real-world challenges. Issues like: Hate Speech, Propaganda, Manipulation, Radicalization of society or even Digital Detox are not addressed at all. These are real problems that everyone should be aware of by now.

Why are such issues not being addressed? Why does the Twitter community celebrate a bot that tweets a year's progress in ASCII characters every day? This is absolutely meaningless in our eyes.

Our call to the developer community is:

Let's look together at what really MATTERS!

What is the benefit of all the unlimited communication and free speech if everyone is just talking crap and believe in it?

We need mechanisms to drive Twitter and other social networks back to where they started. To bring people together instead of dividing them!

What it does

Undressor consists of 2 separate solutions:

the Twitter BOT
the online portal

The Twitter BOT provides a seamless user experience. Users can request the bot via @undressor and gets a reply directly without leaving Twitter. This is very convenient. However, the information content that is tweeted back by the bot in the form of images is still very limited.

In order to provide the user with further detailed information, the online portal(https://undressor.nicolueg.com/) was also developed. In addition to the charts, easy-to-read texts are also provided there. The textual content is intended to tell a story, which at the same time is to be supported by graphically prepared charts.

In addition, the portal offers the possibility to directly analyze different Twitter accounts without affecting an ongoing thread in Twitter.

A dashboard with many more interesting insights is also planned for the future.

usage

You can mention the bot in any Twitter reply via @undressor. The bot then analyzes the account of the author of the original post, visualizes the corresponding data and tweets the analysis back as set of 4 images.

The post also includes a link to the online portal. There you can get more information about the account.

How we built it

architecture

Undressor primarily uses the Twitter infrastructure, consisting of the actual Twitter app and the corresponding Twitter API.

The solution itself consists of 4 separate runtime components:

the Web APP
the REST API
the BOT
and the associated PostgreSQL database

The communication between the Undressor components and the Twitter API is handled by an npm lib "twitter-api-v2".

As a result of the analysis, the bot creates several charts in PNG format and tweets them as a reply. The creation of these images works as follows:

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was the interaction between all the necessary components. This includes the API, the BOT, the UI also the part with Puppeteer, which generates chart images.

We also had to find different solutions for the limits of the Twitter API.

E2E testing with multiple Twitter accounts was also a realy big challenge.

And last but not least, of course, the time!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

There are solutions that are technically superior. Other solutions look pretty. Some that are easy to use. And then there are solutions that actually bring real added value. We believe that our project combines all this in one solution :-)

We have completely finished the bot. Thanks to the evolutionary base architecture, we can implement new features relatively quickly in the future. For example, we have already started to analyze not only the accounts but also the links in the tweets to make the source and context visible.

Undressor is a pure open source solution that anyone can use and run on their own server infrastructure. With Docker Images/Compose, the entire operation is reduced to a single line of bash.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the Twitter API. It's amazing what useful data you can get. But we also learned to deal with the API limits and to set smaller goals at the beginning.

What's next for undressor

We realize that not everything has been finished and probably some things don't quite meet Twitter's guidelines. However, we strongly believe that the approach of our solution is crucial for the future of all social networks.

We have the necessary skills to drive the undressor project forward. It depends more on whether Twitter/Twitter-Communitiy wants to support our solution.