Because they don’t offer DMs or DM metadata for sale. This Kogan guy had no special connections at Twitter or even Facebook for that matter. He was an independent developer using off the shelf offerings of Twitter and Facebook to get what he was after. If DMs aren’t for sale (they’re not) then he didn’t get them.
They don't "sell" DMs - they just hand a DM firehose over to the feds.
Haha - you'd be stupid to think that twitter doesn't do this.
Hell, library of congress archived the full firehose from 2010 until now - and now it will only archive "select content"
Gee - thats because POTUS is using it as his primary platform and a POLICY platform.
So -- it would seem clear that they are using 6-degrees from any and all that comment and RT POTUS tweets, and any other's that they want.
but just because lib of congress is no longer slurping that firehose up -- does not mean that other 5Eyes are not. I think it would be myopically foolish to think that after the NSA was caught intercepting HW and installing spying tech into it, that they wouldn't be doing it for twitter+DMs as well.
Library Of Congress Will No Longer Archive Every Tweet
Since 2010, Library of Congress has been archiving every single public tweet: Yours, ours, the president's.
But today, the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and "big if true"s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets "on a very selective basis."
The library says it began archiving tweets "for the same reason it collects other materials — to acquire and preserve a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and the American people." The archive stretches back to Twitter's beginning, in 2006.
No, there’s not. They don’t sell DMs.