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Paid social-media monitoring

A signed-in user can pay to have a politician's public social-media accounts (Twitter / X, Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon) scraped on a recurring schedule. The captured posts surface publicly on the politician's profile page, attributed to the subscriber who paid for the capture if they opted in, or anonymously as Scraped via paid monitoring if they didn't.

This page explains what the feature is, who it's for, and how it works.

Who it's for

Roughly four audiences, in order of how we've been thinking about it:

  • Journalists building beat coverage. You want a politician's recent posts at a glance without manually trawling four platforms.
  • Researchers and academics studying political discourse. The captured posts go into your data with stable IDs, timestamps, and engagement counts.
  • Civic-tech organizations building accountability tools. Your app can show "the last 50 things this MP said on X" without doing its own scraping or paying a separate vendor.
  • Engaged citizens who care about a particular politician and want a low-friction way to keep a paper trail of their public statements.

The platform is deliberately public-record-leaning. We aren't here for opposition research as a service, and we aren't here for private-account anything.

What gets captured

Only public posts from public accounts on these four platforms today:

We don't access locked / private accounts, DMs, friends-only Facebook posts, or anything not visible to anyone with a web browser. We don't have LinkedIn or Facebook-post scraping. See the disclaimer for the full scope statement.

How it works

  1. Sign in. Magic link only — no passwords.
  2. Buy credits on the credits page. Smallest pack is $5 / 50 credits.
  3. Visit any politician's profile and click Monitor.
  4. Pick the platforms you want and the cadence (weekly / monthly / quarterly). The panel shows a live cost estimate before you commit.
  5. Hit Start monitoring. The first scheduled scrape runs within the cadence window. Each scrape debits credits from your balance; failed scrapes refund automatically.

A scrape happens once per cadence window — weekly means one scrape per week, not a continuous stream. The minimum cadence is weekly deliberately; daily-everything is a money trap and the upstream platforms have their own notification systems if you need real-time.

Pricing

Platform Per refresh Notes
Twitter / X 5 credits ($0.50) Most expensive; Apify actor has a 50-tweet minimum charge per call
Instagram 8 credits ($0.80) Higher per-post Apify pricing than Twitter
Bluesky 1 credit ($0.10) Free upstream; cost covers our compute + storage
Mastodon 1 credit ($0.10) Free upstream; cost covers our compute + storage

Worked example: monitoring one politician on Twitter + Bluesky weekly = (5 + 1) × 4 ≈ 24 credits / month ≈ $2.40.

There's also a one-shot archive action that pulls a deep history in a single call, priced against the politician's total post count (visible after a 1-credit profile preview). The same Monitor panel shows the archive cost beside the recurring cost.

Attribution

On the politician's Recent posts tab, every captured post carries an attribution line. Three states:

  • Anonymous (default) — "Scraped via paid monitoring." The subscriber's name stays private.
  • Opted-in handle — "Funded by @yourhandle" as plain text.
  • Opted-in handle + URL — "Funded by @yourhandle" as a clickable link, rendered with rel="nofollow noopener external" and opened in a new tab. The URL can point at any https:// destination — your newspaper byline, your org site, your social profile, whatever.

To opt in: when you configure monitoring, check the "Show me as the funder of these scrapes on this politician's public profile" box and enter the handle (and optionally the URL) you want shown. You can turn it off again any time via the same panel.

Sample attribution language for orgs:

Use case Handle URL
Independent journalist @yourname https://yournewspaper.com/byline/yourname
Research lab "Carleton Public Policy Lab" https://carleton.ca/sppa/
Civic-tech org "OpenNorth" https://opennorth.ca
Curious citizen (left blank — anonymous) —

Privacy and limits

A few things to know:

  • We never attribute to you publicly without your explicit opt-in.
  • The link "this user paid for this scrape" lives in our private schema and never crosses to the public dataset.
  • Subscriber identity is anonymous-by-default on the public profile; attribution opt-in is a single per-subscription decision.
  • Your monitoring shows up in your own /account/monitoring dashboard regardless of whether you've opted into public attribution.
  • We don't sell or share subscriber data. See the privacy notice.

Removal requests

If you're a politician (or their staff) and you'd like a captured post removed from our system, see the takedown policy. We act on accepted requests within 10 business days — faster for court orders or urgent matters.

If you're a subscriber who wants your attribution removed (you opted in and changed your mind), open the Monitor panel for that politician and uncheck the attribution box. Posts captured by that subscription revert to anonymous Scraped via paid monitoring on the next page load.