Payload Logo

This bot will spend the next year tweeting the Chilcot report

By Joon Ian Wong
Published

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. It looks like this (with humans for scale):

Now you can savor the document, which took seven 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:

The bot issues a new tweet every four and half 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 UK-based developer who worked on it.

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.

📬 Sign up for the Daily Brief

Our free, fast and fun briefing on the global economy, delivered every weekday morning.