R client for accessing Twitter’s REST and stream APIs. Check out the rtweet package documentation website.
To get the current released version from CRAN:
To get the current development version from Github:
## install devtools package if it's not already
if (!requireNamespace("devtools", quietly = TRUE)) {
install.packages("devtools")
}
## install dev version of rtweet from github
devtools::install_github("mkearney/rtweet")
## load rtweet package
library(rtweet)All you need is a Twitter account and you can be up in running in minutes!
auth vignette (or the API authorization section below) for instructions on obtaining access to Twitter’s APIs: http://rtweet.info/articles/auth.html.All users must be authorized to interact with Twitter’s APIs. To become authorized, follow the instructions below to (1) make a Twitter app and (2) create and save your access token (using one of the two authorization methods described below).
Callback URL exactly as it appears below):
Name: Name of Twitter app e.g., my_twitter_research_appDescription: Describe use case e.g., for researching trends and behaviors on twitterWebsite: Valid website e.g., https://twitter.com/kearneymw***Callback URL***: http://127.0.0.1:1410Go to your app’s page at apps.twitter.com and click the tab labeled Keys and Access Tokens
Copy the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret values and pass them, along with the name of your app, to the create_token() function
Go to your app’s page at apps.twitter.com and click the tab labeled Keys and Access Tokens
Scroll down to Token Actions and click Create my access token
Copy the Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token, and Access Token Secret values and pass them, along with the name of your app, to the create_token() function
And that’s it! You’re ready to start collecting and analyzing Twitter data! And because create_token() automatically saves your token as an environment variable, you’ll be set for future sessions as well!
Search for up to 18,000 (non-retweeted) tweets containing the rstats hashtag.
## search for 18000 tweets using the rstats hashtag
rt <- search_tweets(
"#rstats", n = 18000, include_rts = FALSE
)Quickly visualize frequency of tweets over time using ts_plot().
## plot time series of tweets
ts_plot(rt, "3 hours") +
ggplot2::theme_minimal() +
ggplot2::theme(plot.title = ggplot2::element_text(face = "bold")) +
ggplot2::labs(
x = NULL, y = NULL,
title = "Frequency of #rstats Twitter statuses from past 9 days",
subtitle = "Twitter status (tweet) counts aggregated using three-hour intervals",
caption = "\nSource: Data collected from Twitter's REST API via rtweet"
)
Twitter rate limits cap the number of search results returned to 18,000 every 15 minutes. To request more than that, simply set retryonratelimit = TRUE and rtweet will wait for rate limit resets for you.
## search for 250,000 tweets containing the word data
rt <- search_tweets(
"data", n = 250000, retryonratelimit = TRUE
)Search by geo-location—for example, find 10,000 tweets in the English language sent from the United States. Note: lookup_coords() requires users have a Google API key
## search for 10,000 tweets sent from the US
rt <- search_tweets(
"lang:en", geocode = lookup_coords("usa"), n = 10000
)
## create lat/lng variables using all available tweet and profile geo-location data
rt <- lat_lng(rt)
## plot state boundaries
par(mar = c(0, 0, 0, 0))
maps::map("state", lwd = .25)
## plot lat and lng points onto state map
with(rt, points(lng, lat, pch = 20, cex = .75, col = rgb(0, .3, .7, .75)))
Randomly sample (approximately 1%) from the live stream of all tweets.
Stream all geo enabled tweets from London for 60 seconds.
## stream tweets from london for 60 seconds
rt <- stream_tweets(lookup_coords("london, uk"), timeout = 60)Stream all tweets mentioning realDonaldTrump or Trump for a week.
## stream london tweets for a week (60 secs x 60 mins * 24 hours * 7 days)
stream_tweets(
"realdonaldtrump,trump",
timeout = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7,
file_name = "tweetsabouttrump.json",
parse = FALSE
)
## read in the data as a tidy tbl data frame
djt <- parse_stream("tweetsabouttrump.json")Retrieve a list of all the accounts a user follows.
## get user IDs of accounts followed by CNN
cnn_fds <- get_friends("cnn")
## lookup data on those accounts
cnn_fds_data <- lookup_users(cnn_fds$user_id)Retrieve a list of the accounts following a user.
## get user IDs of accounts following CNN
cnn_flw <- get_followers("cnn", n = 75000)
## lookup data on those accounts
cnn_flw_data <- lookup_users(cnn_flw$user_id)Or if you really want ALL of their followers:
## how many total follows does cnn have?
cnn <- lookup_users("cnn")
## get them all (this would take a little over 5 days)
cnn_flw <- get_followers(
"cnn", n = cnn$followers_count, retryonratelimit = TRUE
)Get the most recent 3,200 tweets from cnn, BBCWorld, and foxnews.
## get user IDs of accounts followed by CNN
tmls <- get_timelines(c("cnn", "BBCWorld", "foxnews"), n = 3200)
## plot the frequency of tweets for each user over time
tmls %>%
dplyr::filter(created_at > "2017-10-29") %>%
dplyr::group_by(screen_name) %>%
ts_plot("days", trim = 1L) +
ggplot2::geom_point() +
ggplot2::theme_minimal() +
ggplot2::theme(
legend.title = ggplot2::element_blank(),
legend.position = "bottom",
plot.title = ggplot2::element_text(face = "bold")) +
ggplot2::labs(
x = NULL, y = NULL,
title = "Frequency of Twitter statuses posted by news organization",
subtitle = "Twitter status (tweet) counts aggregated by day from October/November 2017",
caption = "\nSource: Data collected from Twitter's REST API via rtweet"
)
Get the 3,000 most recently favorited statuses by JK Rowling.
Search for 1,000 users with the rstats hashtag in their profile bios.
Discover what’s currently trending in San Francisco.
Obtaining and using Twitter API tokens
Quick overview of rtweet package
Troubleshooting common rtweet problems
Communicating with Twitter’s APIs relies on an internet connection, which can sometimes be inconsistent. With that said, if you encounter an obvious bug for which there is not already an active issue, please create a new issue with all code used (preferably a reproducible example) on Github.