Do Multiple Listeners to the Public Twitter Sample Stream Receive the Same Tweets?

Do multiple listeners to the public Twitter sample stream receive the same tweets? Due to limitations on redistribution of Twitter data, the answer to this question is important for the replicability and reproducibility of research findings. A negative answer creates barriers for different research groups to evaluate algorithms and systems on the same collection of tweets. We describe a pilot experiment in preparation for the TREC 2015 Microblog track that answers this question in the affirmative, which means that an evaluation methodology built on geographically dispersed research groups independently crawling the Twitter streaming API is feasible.