Formerly known as Tweep, Twint is an advanced Twitter scraping tool written in Python that allows for scraping Tweets from Twitter profiles without using Twitter's API.
Twint utilizes Twitter's search operators to let you scrape Tweets from specific users, scrape Tweets relating to certain topics, hashtags & trends, or sort out sensitive information from Tweets like e-mail and phone numbers. I find this very useful, and you can get really creative with it too.
Twint also makes special queries to Twitter allowing you to also scrape a Twitter user's followers, Tweets a user has liked, and who they follow without any authentication, API, Selenium, or browser emulation.
Benefits
Some of the benefits of using Twint vs Twitter API:
- Can fetch almost all Tweets (Twitter API limits to last 3200 Tweets only)
- Fast initial setup
- Can be used anonymously and without Twitter sign up
- No rate limitations
Requirements
- Python 3.6
Installing
Git:
git clone https://github.com/twintproject/twint.git
pip3 install -r requirements.txtPip:
pip3 install --upgrade -e git+https://github.com/twintproject/[email protected]/master#egg=twintPipenv:
pipenv install -e git+https://github.com/twintproject/twint.git#egg=twintCLI Basic Examples and Combos
A few simple examples to help you understand the basics:
twint -u username- Scrape all the Tweets from user's timeline.twint -u username -s pineapple- Scrape all Tweets from the user's timeline containing pineapple.twint -s pineapple- Collect every Tweet containing pineapple from everyone's Tweets.twint -u username --year 2014- Collect Tweets that were tweeted before 2014.twint -u username --since 2015-12-20- Collect Tweets that were tweeted since 2015-12-20.twint -u username -o file.txt- Scrape Tweets and save to file.txt.twint -u username -o file.csv --csv- Scrape Tweets and save as a csv file.twint -u username --email --phone- Show Tweets that might have phone numbers or email addresses.twint -s "Donald Trump" --verified- Display Tweets by verified users that Tweeted about Donald Trump.twint -g="48.880048,2.385939,1km" -o file.csv --csv- Scrape Tweets from a radius of 1km around a place in Paris and export them to a csv file.twint -u username -es localhost:9200- Output Tweets to Elasticsearchtwint -u username -o file.json --json- Scrape Tweets and save as a json file.twint -u username --database tweets.db- Save Tweets to a SQLite database.twint -u username --followers- Scrape a Twitter user's followers.twint -u username --following- Scrape who a Twitter user follows.twint -u username --favorites- Collect all the Tweets a user has favorited.twint -u username --following --user-full- Collect full user information a person followstwint -u username --profile-full- Use a slow, but effective method to gather Tweets from a user's profile (Gathers ~3200 Tweets, Including Retweets).twint -u username --retweets- Use a quick method to gather the last 900 Tweets (that includes retweets) from a user's profile.twint -u username --resume 10940389583058- Resume a search starting from the specified Tweet ID.
More detail about the commands and options are located in the wiki
Module Example
Twint can now be used as a module and supports custom formatting. More details are located in the wiki
import twint
# Configure
c = twint.Config()
c.Username = "noneprivacy"
c.Search = "#osint"
c.Format = "Tweet id: {id} | Tweet: {tweet}"
# Run
twint.run.Search(c)Output
955511208597184512 2018-01-22 18:43:19 GMT <now> pineapples are the best fruit
import twint
c = twint.Config()
c.Username = "noneprivacy"
c.Custom["tweet"] = ["id"]
c.Custom["user"] = ["bio"]
c.Limit = 10
c.Store_csv = True
c.Output = "none"
twint.run.Search(c)Storing Options
- Write to file
- CSV
- JSON
- SQLite
- Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch Setup
Details on setting up Elasticsearch with Twint is located in the wiki.
Graph Visualization
Graph details are also located in the wiki.
We are developing a Twint Desktop App.
FAQ
I tried scraping tweets from a user, I know that they exist but I'm not getting them
Twitter can shadow-ban accounts, which means that their tweets will not be available via search. To solve this, pass --profile-full if you are using Twint via CLI or, if are using Twint as module, add config.Profile_full = True. Please note that this process will be quite slow.
More Examples
Followers/Following
To get only follower usernames/following usernames
twint -u username --followers
twint -u username --following
To get user info of followers/following users
twint -u username --followers --user-full
twint -u username --following --user-full
userlist
To get only user info of user
twint -u username --user-full
To get user info of users from a userlist
twint --userlist inputlist --user-full
Contact
If you have any questions, want to join in on discussions, or need extra help, you are welcome to join our Twint focused Slack server.
If you are interested in OSINT and still seeking for help or suggestions, join the OSINT community at OSINT Team (there is a specific Twint channel)
