Social Media Data and Tools

Begin by reading X / Twitter's Developer Agreement and Policy. X / Twitter data is challenging to acquire and use since X / Twitter made changes to their API.

There are two primary ways to access X / Twitter data:

1. Work with existing X / Twitter datasets. Many datasets contain only the Tweet IDs. Prior to changes at X / Twitter you could "hydrate" the Tweet IDs using the Hydrator app and connect them to their original tweet, but X / Twitter has revoked access to Hydrator and so those tweets can no longer be hydrated.

• Tweet ID Data Sets curated by Documenting the Now. A collectively curated listing of X / Twitter datasets.
• TweetSets from George Washington University Libraries. X / Twitter datasets for research and archiving.

2. Apply for a X / Twitter developer account and pay for access to the X / Twitter API and extract data directly. Basic access to the X / Twitter API costs $100/month and allows you to retrieve up to 10,000 tweets/month.

• Resources for extracting X / Twitter data after paying for access to their API
  • Tweepy Python library. An easy-to-use Python library for accessing the X / Twitter API.
  • Data Knowledge Hub, How To Stream, Store and Retrieve Data on X (Twitter)
  • Programming Historian, Beginner's Guide to Twitter Data