Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging service. With each "entry" being 280 (formerly 140) characters or less, the ease with which you can track the tiniest details of your life is amazing. The site has become very popular as a result.
The site is becoming so popular, in fact, that many people are deserting or cutting back on their weblogs to just use the Twitter service for what their weblogging used to fulfill; and with that comes rampant centralization, and with that, greater risk. Back up your tweets!
== Archives ==
There are currently a few archives (but only partially):
* Cheng-Caverlee-Lee September 2009 - January 2010 Twitter Scrape: almost 10 millon tweets
* The May 2011 Calufa Twitter Scrape: 90+ million tweets from more than 6 million users
* 
The Twitter search API seemingly returns only the latest 7 days worth of tweets.
== Backup Tools ==
* Twitter enables you to request an archive of all of your tweets from the main settings page, which includes every tweet of yours (therefore bypassing the normal 3200 tweet API limit). This is then emailed to the address linked with the account.
* snscrape
* Tweets can be archived easily through socialbot (an IRC bot that utilizes snscrape, ArchiveBot. Alternatively, run snscrape locally, upload the list of URLs to https://transfer.archivete.am/, and feed them into ArchiveBot using the !ao < file command.
* t by sferik is a command-line interface for Twitter using the API via an application you create on your account. Not only does it allow easy CSV/JSON export of your own data, but it allows you to scrape others tweets. API limits apply but this tool is very powerful
Twitter automatically resizes uploaded images. To get image in its original resolution, append :orig after the url, e.g.:
 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CBAoaU1UwAIUPIc.jpg:orig
You can set &name=orig to get the original resolution (actually same as &name=large) image (Note: removing &name will result in medium size image)
* The Python Twitter API by sixohsix has some pretty easy to use scripts for archiving Twitter accounts to a TXT file for people who aren't as technically inclined. It can only save the last 3K or so tweets due to inbuilt Twitter limits, though. (Note: the "-o" flag is pretty much required to archive accounts.)
* twarc - for example, you can archive a user with snscrape -f "{id}" twitter-user USER | twarc hydrate > data.txt.
* Here's a Gist with a step-by-step guide to getting a long list of a user's tweet status URL's, using a Python program called Tweep.
* Tweetscan Data (died sometime after 2014) downloaded your Twitter archive from 12/2007 onward in CSV format (requires Twitter account login/password)
* gallery-dl's Twitter extractor still seems to work as of 2024-12-22
=== Scraping ===
See Site exploration for details.
== Vital Signs == 
In 2017, a subsidiary forum, "translate.twitter.com", was discontinued.https://archive.fo/https://translate.twitter.com/forum%2A
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. This may lock up accessible tweets behind paywall, login wall or identity verification wall.
The main site is still online, although Elon Musk fired half of the Twitter staff in November 2022 so it's possible this could ultimately put the site in jeopardy. He also reportedly warned employees that the site is at risk of going bankrupt in 2023.
As of November 17, 2022, many former Twitter employees are saying that many vital Twitter services are now being maintained by a single-digit number of technicians. This could ultimately result in Twitter losing its services.
On December 9, 2022, Elon Musk announced that accounts with no Tweets that have no activity for an extended period of time would be deleted to make room for new accounts. As an alternative interpretation of the statement, this could refer to accounts that have not Tweeted in a long time.
On February 2, 2023, Twitter announced free API access will be discontinued and replaced with a paid subscription tier. 
During March 2023, Twemoji's maintainers were fired. Its usage in Twitter's mobile apps has since been dropped, with the native emojis now being used. A fork of Twemoji has been created by the ex-maintainers and is currently used by Discord.
During April 2023, Twitter Inc. was folded into Elon Musk's new company X Corp. Twitter began rebranding into "X", to align with Elon's visions of an "everything app". This rebrand was initiated in July 2023, with the Twitter branding and logo being phased out.
In mid-April 2023, access to Twitter's search function was locked behind a login prompt, requiring users to have an account in order to search for tweets. This makes it more difficult to scrape tweets. 
On 8 May 2023, Elon Musk announced that Twitter is "purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years". He later clarified that "the accounts will be archived". Twitter's "inactive account policy" defines inactive accounts as those that have not been logged in for at least 30 days, and says that accounts "may be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity". (Before May 2023, the time needed for an account to become "inactive" was 6 months.)https://web.archive.org/web/20230419143120/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/inactive-twitter-accounts
On 30 June 2023, Twitter made it impossible to view tweets without logging into an account. This was likely done in response to decreasing user activity levels. Elon Musk later wrote on Twitter: "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping." (via Hacker News) Logged-in users are also subject to a per-day post rate limit of 10000 (for Twitter Blue subscribers), 1000 (for normal accounts), or 500 (for new, not-subscribed accounts). On 5 July, Twitter silently removed the login requirement to view individual tweets, although user feeds and tweet threads still require logging in.
== Also see ==
* Twitter watchlist – Accounts with volatile content.
* List of lost Twitter accounts – Twitter accounts that went private, disabled, suspended or deleted a significant amount of content.
== Library of Congress ==
The U.S. Library of Congress announced in April 2010, via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. As of 2016-02-23, this archive is still not available, and when/if it does become accessible it will likely be restricted to researchers, rather than the general public. In January 2017, it was announced that the Library of Congress will no longer archive all tweets, just ones from major news stories.
== Workarounds ==
Current and former workarounds:
* Various thread unrolling services, for eg https://unrollnow.com/ https://threadreaderapp.com/
* Replace twitter.com or x.com with neinx.com - returns an image of the tweet or latest tweet, always seems to work, works in ArchiveBot
* Replace twitter.com or x.com with twstalker.com - returns HTML, very dodgy site, almost always works in a browser but ArchiveBot gets 403s, can return HTTP 200 even when there are errors
* Replace twitter.com or x.com with twiiit.com - redirects to a Nitter instance, some of them are working sometimes, not useful for ArchiveBot
* snscrape - bot that put data into the WBM
== ArchiveBot ==
The archivebot-twitter Etherpad page is being used to co-ordinate ArchiveBot based archiving of Twitter/X accounts. Please add to it if you have accounts that need to be archived when we have the capability to do so. Usually there is no way to do that, but sometimes Nitter starts working again or other options come up. 
== Lists ==
* List of Twitter hashtags by country and territory
* List of Twitter hashtags by language
== External links ==
* 
* 
 
Category:Microblogging services