Hello,
I need help please:
I am writing my Master’s thesis and I was wondering if it’s possible to find out the exact number of Twitter followers of NBA players on any specific date since I want to investigate the influence of the player’s performance on his popularity. For example, I would need to find out how many followers Luca Doncic had on the 12th of December 2020.
Could this be possible with Academic Research or Basic access? I don’t have experience in using API and would therefore like to find out whether it’s possible at all.
Thank you!
This is unfortunately not possible unless you managed to gather some data at that time - the API always returns the most current data for the user.
The best thing to do is to try and find some old datasets maybe - but this only really works for very big accounts.
Thank you for the quick response!
Do you know if it’s not possible even with Academic Research access?
I saw this quote on their Academic Research application page: “Academic Research access includes full-archive search…”. This made me think that it might be possible if you apply for the extended access.
No, Academic Access is for Search API for tweets only - and that will return old tweets, but the user objects will be the current ones.
The only other way to do it would be to try and examine the order of follows and get an upper bound based on user creation dates: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/know-followed-last-summer-inferring-social-link-creation-times-twitter/ but it’s very involved and only really works well for large accounts.
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