Hi, we have developped a free mobile application that protects people from cyber-bullying on Twitter in French, we have more than 18 000 users but we have a big restriction from the Twitter REST API :
We can’t see when people quote tweets of our user and there is a lot of cyber-bullying from theses mentions.
Is there any way to access to quoted tweets mentions ?
We’ve already tried the “search” method (searching the URL of a tweet), but it’s not really efficient.
Thanks a lot !
It sounds like you need tweet create events but this is not a free API https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/accounts-and-users/subscribe-account-activity/guides/account-activity-data-objects#tweet_create_events
Unfortunately the search method might be as good as it gets - but this can be made more efficient if you use app-only authentication (450 calls with app only, and 180 for a user token - each user has their own limit) and keep track of since_id so you can limit results to just the latest tweets.
Hi Igor, thank you for your answer.
As you said, unfortunnatelly we can’t pay for the Twitter Account Activity API (our application is free and without ads).
We have the same result if we use app-only auth or user auth while searching for quoted tweets.
For example :
Query query = new Query(“https://twitter.com/alilde_/status/1030042684432498688”); -> no results
But if we search this URL directly on the website, we have results -> https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Falilde_%2Fstatus%2F1030042684432498688&src=typd
I think that many developpers are impacted by this problem !
The standard search API does not directly mirror the results from the Twitter website. It was an API acquired around 11 years ago. The limitations are described in the documentation:
The Twitter’s standard search API (search/tweets) allows simple queries against the indices of recent or popular Tweets and behaves similarly to, but not exactly like the Search UI feature available in Twitter mobile or web clients. The Twitter Search API searches against a sampling of recent Tweets published in the past 7 days.
Before digging in, it’s important to know that the standard search API is focused on relevance and not completeness . This means that some Tweets and users may be missing from search results. If you want to match for completeness you should consider the premium or enterprise search APIs.
You mention that you’re not able to look into commercial options, but the premium search service is more likely to serve your use case here.
Hi Andy, thank you for your answer, i really can’t afford to pay for an API.
I saw in your public trello API roadmap that you are planning to modernize the search/tweets endpoint, any chances that one day it’ll match the Website Search results ?
Or any chances that you add quoted tweets mentions in the statuses/mentions_timeline endpoint ?
We don’t have anything to share on specific plans for those endpoints right now, but stay tuned.