Science and News Twitter/X Summarizer

Like many people, I appreciate the information on Twitter/X (despite all of the waves of exodus), but I don’t necessarily like the toxicity or the time sink.

So I (and my buddy Claude Fable) made a digest app that gives you the day’s news and science discussions.

The “science” section is based on links to journal articles, ranked by engagement and classified by field.

The “news” section is based on keywords related to “straight” world-affairs news topics, like “war” or “election”, clustered by story and ranked by engagement. The idea is to cover the sorts of things that would be on the front page of a traditional newspaper, as opposed to entertainment or opinion. Keywords are translated into the top non-English languages on Twitter/X (Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Indonesian) and posts in any language are auto-translated into English.1

Summaries of tweets and their associated articles use Sonnet 5; classification uses Haiku 4.5. Links to original tweets and associated articles are included.

Both Science and News sections are based on advanced search queries using the API. There are no cherrypicked accounts being followed except some wire services like AP and Reuters.

News stories link to newspapers, news sites, and wire services where relevant, but they’re explicitly not limited to topics discussed by the “mainstream media”; social-media-only “citizen reporting” is included, though flagged as “unsubstantiated” when there are no links to professional news sources.

The repo is here if you want to take a look; please do comment with any bugs or feature requests if you’re interested in trying it out.

1

Twitter/X is very popular in Japan, so if Japanese stories are overrepresented, that’s why. Likewise, Chinese stories will be underrepresented because Twitter/X is blocked in China.

Discuss