Accessing suspended account's tweets

[johnblythe]

Hi, all. Inaugural post here!

I’m attempting to do some research on the social activities surrounding Twitter fights and trolling, specifically the sort that gets people deplatformed. Roger Stone this week, Milo Y and Leslie Jones’ fight last year, etc.

I can’t seem to access anything from the suspended account. This isn’t entirely surprising, of course, but I have been looking around to see if there is a way to access this data via the REST API, so far to no avail. Can someone please confirm or deny that’s the case? If so, any thoughts as to ways around this or other methods of discerning those trends?

Thanks for any insight-

[andypiper]

Data from suspended accounts is not available via the API.

[johnblythe]

thanks, andy. is there any sort of workaround? exchanges with that account, for instance, that still persist? or even a third-party site that has all historic twitter data laying around?

thanks

[andypiper]

Well, you could potentially search for Tweets that reference the account you’re interested in via @mentions. The standard search API provides up to 7 days of data, for more complete historical search you’d need to be on one of our enterprise APIs.

Third party sites are not permitted to persist Twitter data in this way - the developer policy is clear that services that use Twitter data must remove it promptly in these cases:

If Content is deleted, gains protected status, or is otherwise suspended, withheld, modified, or removed from the Twitter Service (including removal of location information), you will make all reasonable efforts to delete or modify such Content (as applicable) as soon as reasonably possible, and in any case within 24 hours after a request to do so by Twitter or by a Twitter user with regard to their Content.

[johnblythe]

bummer. hmm. will have to think through the options. good idea re the @mentions route.

thanks for the quick help/clarification, andy.