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.