PERSECUTING.US
Event Type: exhibition
Start Date: 20 Dec 2012 – 26 Jan 2013
Hours: Tues – Sat, 12-6PM
Cost: Free
Venue: Eyebeam Store
Eyebeam Resident Paolo Cirio exposes one million Twitter users to public persecution in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election as he turns his website project PERSECUTING.US into a physical sound installation at the Eyebeam Store. With more than 50 days worth of audio, a computer read aloud the million stolen, sorted, and exposed tweets.
Months leading up to the election, Cirio privately stole data from Twitter from over one million Americans tweeting about the election, systematically determining the political affiliation of each user. All of their information, including first and last names, locations, and pictures, can now be found on Persecuting.us, Cirio’s massive citizen-sorting database.
Persecuting.us offers a platform where everyone can take part in a participatory model pushed to extremes, engaging people in surveying and persecuting each other in a form of info-civil-war of political polarization, which can potentially erupt into defamation, intimidation and oppression of domestic enemies.
Hundreds of Thousands of Americans are now exposed as right or left wing with a percentage calculated by their tweets and connections on Twitter. Like extremists, 120% right-wing and 200K people categorized as 74% left-wing, this without their permission and knowledge. The data has been scraped from the server of Twitter and stored for ever on PERSECUTING.US.
Eyebeam WWW site for the Persecuting.US exhibition at Archive.org