This Bot Will Spend the Next Year Tweeting the Chilcot Report
![Two men glance through The Iraq Inquiry Report presented by Sir John Chilcot at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London, Wednesday, July 6, 2016.](https://cdn.nextgov.com/media/img/cd/2016/07/06/070716chilcotreportNG/860x394.jpg?1627529746)
Two men glance through The Iraq Inquiry Report presented by Sir John Chilcot at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London, Wednesday, July 6, 2016. Jeff J Mitchell/AP
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?