This would be desirable for research into both active & historical fake & disinfo accounts. Academics might also like it

Description

An endpoint or method that returns whether accounts has been renamed, suspended, deactivated or deleted, for both a single account and a list of accounts.

We should be able to pass in either screenname or id or idstr, or lists thereof.

Return an appropriately detailed JSON object.

We can currently only establish if an account is suspended by attempting a GET user/show & then parsing the error response codes.

Rationale

It used to be possible to do a quick and dirty check on whether an account had been suspended by using cURL on the url

twitter.com/intent/user?.......

and completing it with either screenname= or userid=.

One could then parse the response and extract the title tag to see whether an individual account was still active or had been suspended.

If one had 10 or 20 ids to deal with, it was fast and required no faffing about with code for usable, helpful data.

The page code has been changed & this is now impossible.

An alternative is to use GET user/lookup

This of course only returns user objects if the user still exists on twitter.

But we can’t know if the withheld user objects are not returned because they are suspended or because they have been deleted or deactivated by the user.

To establish if an account is suspended we have to use user/show, which for a large # of ids is expensive (i.e. we rapidly run into rate-limits) & even then have to parse the error rather than get a straightforward response.

All this makes tracking fake & disinfo accounts harder than it needs to be.

Hence the “intent” url was incredibly useful.

The new error collection is awesome! I am glad that we can now understand why fewer items are returned than requested.
However, the errors are not always useful, in some cases you get
status:403
title:"Forbidden"
type:"about:blank"
detail:"Forbidden"

1. It is not clear which element caused this error since the error index is not correlated with the input id index, ideally there should be a reference to which id caused this error, and the order of the results returned seems random.




2. It is not clear what's the reason for this error, in cases when we are returning a list, it's probably not important, but since this new endpoint is now also a replacement for users/show we need to tell the user why they can't see this profile (or tweet, as I imagine the same thing happens in labs/1/tweets), were they blocked from seeing this profile (or tweet), was the account suspended by twitter, or profile (or tweet) deleted by user, so there needs to be a distinction in the error codes too.