Twitter monitoring tools on Github

There are many reasons why one might want to monitor what’s happening on social media. And there are also many cases where there’s a real public interest in monitoring particular activities. Despite having been shut down by Twitter recently, Sun Foundation’s Politwoops was doing the conversation a service by keeping a record of US Congressmen’s tweets - asking them why they deleted some of them.

Disclaimer: keeping tweets that were deleted is against Twitter’s policy (you know, this document you signed without reading it when you signed up). You’re supposed to honour this rule: if it’s not on Twitter (because it has been deleted or because the user is private or has been suspended), you must delete the content.

However, there’s a case for not honouring this policy. And here are some tools to do so - use them at your own risks.

You will find in this Github repository a collection of Python scripts to monitor deleted tweets, automate screenshoting, and archiving.

• streaming.py and save_to_db.py work together to grab a real-time streamed timeline from Twitter and save all the results in a database.
• All the tweets in the database are then screenshot by screenshot.py
• Finally, the monitoring.py worker crawls through the database and checks if the tweets have been deleted.
• I included get_user_ids.py, as the Twitter API often requires the ID, and not the screen name (eg not “@basilesimon”).

Dependencies and install

• git clone this repo
• pip install tweepy
• pip install MySQL-python (but you might need to apt-get install build-essential python-dev libmysqlclient-dev. I read it’s easy to install on Max OS, with Homebrew)
• pip install needle
• You will need a comma-separated list of user IDs (see below), or a list of keywords you want to track. See all the other options in the Docs.
• Obviously, you will also need your developer access keys and things. Paste them in the placeholders accordingly in each file.

Comma-separated list of user IDs

I use the wonderful t from sferik, a command line tool for twitter shenanigans. Usually, I have an account following all the people I want to track - but it also works with lists.

• $ t followings [account] > list.csv
• python get_user_ids.py > ids.csv

Run the program

Then to run it:

• Run streaming.py. Constantly. If it doesn’t run, you’re not saving the tweets.
• Run nosetests screenshot.py --with-save-baseline --nocapture periodically to grab the screenshots.
• Run monitoring.py periodically to check for deleted tweets.

You might want to consider running all these with cron on a server. Just saying.

License

PDD/ Unlicense