Question posted in 
For a research project, I would like to access the behavior of specific Twitter/X users, i.e. tweets and likes. In our setting, we would ask participants for their Twitter names and get their permission to use publicly available data about their accounts. Since we want to access the data of many people, I am looking for an effective solution.
Since scraping is no longer allowed (e.g. Robots.txt, Terms of Service), I looked at the twitter API v2 (Details here).
This raises the following questions:
- Can you generally retrieve tweets and likes for specific accounts if the account name is provided? (and permission has been granted)
- If so, it is possible with the free version? I found different statements (Tweet caps – Pull are zero, indicating no possibility to retrieve tweets, Tweet caps 1,500 Tweets per month, indicating the possibility to retrieve tweets)
Are there any other ways to retrieve data from twitter/X?
Has anyone perhaps worked with the new twitter/X API and has ideas on the questions above?
2
Answers
The Free version of the API allows retrieval of up to 1500 tweets per month. For additional features such as retweets and likes, a paid version is required, and these functionalities are not available with a free account at the moment.
The free account is write-only. You need at least a basic ($10/mo) account to read tweets, and the basic account is limited to 10K pulls/mo.
see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-started/about-twitter-api