I have a small number of role accounts that I’m using for API access. Basically I have some researchers interested in language usage among in-groups, so they put group members on a list, I pull the tweets for that list, and then we do some natural language processing.
I am having a terrible time with API access and I don’t think it’s me. First I just created an app for each account. One of six worked, the rest are failing. I’m using the latest version of Tweepy for access.
I rigged up an auth method so one of the accounts is the source and the rest get tokens based on that app. This got me two more of the six working.
The rest are simply unworkable - they can’t auth after they create their own apps, they can’t use the apps others have. I am starting to wonder if this is some issue with how ‘uninteresting’ these accounts are - they’re basically a basket of eggs, they follow each other, but their lists are private and they haven’t tweeted. Is there some minimum hurdle in terms of tweets that a new account has to cross before it can register? I find that a bit hard to believe - if someone signs a new account the very first thing they might do would be signing in to some app like Hootsuite.
I’ve revisited this a few times now, creating and deleting apps, trying to auth from different ones that I do have working. It’s turned into a real head scratcher.
