Twitter Insight
Scan what the internet never forgets
Problem
What does the internet know about us? What story does our online data tell? How much information does a single Twitter account contain?
Solution
A Web app designed and developed together with Max Herrmann. Twitter Insight visualizes data from a Twitter account using the Twitter API. It tells a story about how much we reveal about ourselves on social networks and uncovers things we may have already forgotten.
Disclaimer
I distance myself from the actions and ideologies of the people analyzed in the examples.
Idea
The core idea was to illustrate how much personal information is accessible on social media. By visualizing this information, users should be encouraged to rethink their digital presence.
That’s why the focus was on selecting the right data and visualizing it in a way that evokes emotion.
We chose Twitter because the platform is known for intense opinion-sharing and its publicly available API provides a wealth of data.
Logo
The logo draws inspiration from the aesthetic of X-ray scans. The Twitter logo is “X-rayed to the bone,” revealing a bird skeleton structure based on anatomically accurate avian bones.
This enhances recognition and emphasizes the app’s purpose: scanning through Twitter accounts.
Implementation
Twitter Insight was developed using React.js, a framework well-suited for building interactive web interfaces.
On the start page, you can enter a Twitter handle. The app then visualizes information about the account across six categories: ➤Number of followers, ➤Verified status (whether the profile is verified), ➤Published media and their interactions (if available), ➤Join date and one of the account’s first tweets, ➤Word analysis, ➤Time analysis (days of the week and times of day the account tends to tweet)
After that follows an end screen with a brief project explanation.
Outlook
User testing showed that early tweets and older posts often trigger strong emotions like shame or nostalgia.
If you’d like to try out the web app, there’s a test version available. This test version uses a dataset from Donald Trump’s Twitter account from early 2019.
Twitter Insight is an experimental reminder of how much the internet knows about us. It encourages reflection on the amount of personal information we share on social media.
Dataset from Donald Trump’s Twitter account from early 2019