One man is now tweeting every known U.S. drone strike
United States Air Force
The social media experiment shows the size of the drone program.
Josh Begley set out to tweet a complete history of known U.S. drone strikes Tuesday with the goal of doing it all in ten minutes. Except there were way too many strikes to tweet, so his original plan fell apart pretty quickly.
You might recognize Begley's name. He is the guy who designed the iPhone app that mapped all the U.S. drone strikes worldwide using publicly available information. Apple removed it multiple times from the App Store this summer. So Begley set out anew to tweet the entire history of drone strikes, spanning over a decade, from an account he created especially for the project, @DroneStream:
Nov 3, 2002: In the first known US targeted assassination using a drone, a CIA Predator struck a car, killing 6 (Yemen) news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2402479.s…
— Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012
That was the first one that went up this morning. Each tweet accompanies a corresponding news story reporting the strike. Begley told the Daily Beast that his project is for an NYU graduate class called Narrative Lab.