Hi there,
For my research in the detection of fake news/misinformation via propagation patterns, I have to collect the friends of a large amount of users. With the current rate limit of 15 request per 15-minute window this would approximately take more than a year to complete.
Is there another way of leveraging the Academic Access API in order to achieve a faster collection of the users friends.
With kind regards,
Guus Toussaint
No, Academic Access gives you search and stream only. You can double your calls if you use both the Bearer token and Access token auth though, giving you 30 calls in 15 minutes. Also it’s worth using the v1.1 API for this, as the https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/accounts-and-users/follow-search-get-users/api-reference/get-friends-ids endpoint can get up to 5000 IDs in 1 call, while the v2 endpoint gets a max of 1000 per call.
You can further optimize of you look up the users ahead of time and make calls to GET friends/list | Docs | Twitter Developer Platform endpoint, that can get 200 users per call, so you can process the low follower accounts with that.
I think using both v1.1 and v2 endpoints is also possible, so you should be able to significantly improve collection speed, at the cost of extra development time.
1 Like
Thanks, I will look into optimising the collection process by leveraging the benefits from the different endpoints. Dividing the work into low friends accounts also is a great tip, thanks!
1 Like
