Python code based on the example provided by TwitterDev to retrieve a Twitter network.
The idea is to define some target accounts, retrieve their followers (retreieve_followers0.py) and the other accounts that are followed by the previously retrieved ones.
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Twitter project's BEARER_TOKEN set as environmental variable.
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List of the IDs of the accounts whose followers we want to get. You can use this tool to retrive the IDs of one account starting from its username.
To obtain the followers of the account(s) provided in the list (examples):
pip install requests
python retrievefollowers0.py -l "2244994945,1334200897081987072"
python retrievefollowers0.py -l "2244994945,1334200897081987072" -t 100000
-l --list required parameter: list of the ids
-t --treshold optional parameter: changes the treshold to define an account as big (default 75000)
-c --cursor optional parameter: to start the search from a certain token (given by Twitter in the previous request and saved to the log file)
When there's interest about just one accont the commas can be omitted:
python retrievefollowers0.py -l 2244994945
The scripts retrieves 15000 followers and enriched information about them (number of posts, number of followers, location if available, username...) each 15minutes for small accounts (default <=75K followers) and 75000 ids each 15 minutes for the the followers for big accounts (default >75K followers)
Results are then saved in a newly created 'data' directory as JSON files (one for each of the accounts provided in the call).
Once retrieved the followers of the target account the script retrieve_following can be used to search for other accounts, other than the target ones, that the retrieved account follows.
The script needs a json file target_requests.json located in the folder 'data/database_ids/' containing the requests formatted as https://api.twitter.com/2/users/{user_id}/following?user.fields={desired user fileds}'. The script will retrieve information about 1000 accounts followed by each of the accounts in input. Performs 15 requests each 15 minutes then sleeps not to exceed Twitter limits.
python retrieve_following.py