This Bot Will Spend the Next Year Tweeting the Chilcot Report
The report is 2.6 million words long.
The Chilcot report is long—2.6 million words long. It takes the form of 12 hefty volumes that occupy a table measuring several meters in length, in print form.
Now, you can savor the document, which took 7 years to produce and find that the United Kingdom joined the invasion of Iraq under dubious circumstances, in tweet-sized bursts.
Chilcot Bot began its task just after the report was published today. Its inaugural tweet reads:
Introduction 1. In 2003, for the first time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom took part in an opposed invasion and
— Chilcot Bot (@ChilcotBot) July 6, 2016
The bot issues a new tweet every 4.5 minutes or so, according to a calculation by Motherboard. It was created by BuzzFeed to reproduce the text in a more “digestible” form, according to Chris Applegate, a U.K.-based developer who worked on it.
To make the Chilcot report more digestible, we've built @ChilcotBot, to update you 140 characters at a time https://t.co/Jgebsu00va
— Chris Applegate (@chrisapplegate) July 6, 2016
Chilcot Bot will complete the regurgitation of its corpus in a year’s time. If you don’t follow its tweets from the beginning, you’ll be confronted with a stream of incomprehensible text in reverse-chronological order. Or you could scroll all the way to the start.
NEXT STORY: Why Is Iraq Still Using Fake Bomb Detectors?