Integrating Compliance Firehose

The Compliance Firehose is a realtime streaming API that delivers compliance events that occur on the Twitter platform. For an understanding of compliance events and how they are generated on Twitter, please reference our article, Honoring User Intent on Twitter.

It is important to note that Tweet and User events are delivered independently and that each should be processed independently (i.e. a Tweet delete doesn’t imply a User event, and vice versa.) Several User events are not necessarily permanent and can toggle between states infinitely. These include: user_delete,user_undelete, user_protect, user_unprotect and user_suspend, user_unsuspend.

User_deletes are followed by status_deletes 30 days later only if the user has not selected to user_undelete their account. It is possible that a user_delete is reversed by the user and deletes for all of their tweets 30 days later do not occur.

User_suspend is an action that remains true unless the user is subject to an user_unsuspend event. These are not subject to any changes on a 30 day time period.

It is never suitable to display compliance events directly to users of your software or to otherwise incorporate them into your products or customer experiences. They are intended solely for maintaining compliance and honoring the actions of Twitter users.

Integrating with the Compliance Firehose

To integrate the Compliance Firehose into your system, you will need to build an integration that can do the following:

  1. Establish a streaming connection to each streaming API partition of the Compliance Firehose
  2. Handle high data volumes – de-couple stream ingestion from additional processing using asynchronous processes
  3. Reconnect to the stream partitions automatically when disconnected for any reason
  4. Process compliance events that are relevant to Tweet and User data you have stored in accordance with the guidance presented above