Retweeted_status->retweet_count always 0 in Streaming API tweets

[DavidDiGiovanni]

I am using the Streaming API to pull in a tweet, check if the tweet is a retweet of a tweet that was previously pulled in by my app, and if so update the retweet_count for the original tweet.

Here you can see the tweet object for the original tweet. Using API 1.0, you can see view the following URL in your browser and see that the “retweet_count” is not zero (14 when I last checked):

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show.json?id=274994761146978304&include_entities=true

In my application, this is the tweet object for a retweet of the original tweet shown above. You can see that the “retweeted_status->retweet_count” value is 0:

http://hashtaglab.com/wp-content/plugins/140dev/db/test-parse.php

Every time a new retweet of that original tweet comes in, it shows the retweet_count as zero. It used to show a pretty accurate/up to date count of retweets.

Any ideas?

[DavidDiGiovanni]

Ok, so it started working again a couple days later. I wonder what happened.

[FlexViking]

I am having the same issues. It’s been 9 days and retweet_count is always 0.

[DavidDiGiovanni]

Yea, I don’t know why this happens and I can’t find anything on the topic.

My solution was to create my own retweet counter if the retweet_count value is coming back as zero.

So now when a tweet comes into my stream, I check the retweet_count value to see if it is non-zero. If so, I update the retweet count for the original tweet in my database.

If it is zero, I simply increment the retweet count for the original tweet by 1.

[TweetazineApp]

Hi we are finding the same problem with the streaming API.

Doing a search for ‘RT’ which will only return retweeted statuses (and at least some percentage of these will be have than more than one retweet, so the retweet count should be at least 1) only returns retweet_count as 0 for single tweet and retweet status as false.

Its an error and its critical to our app.

So to be extremely clear

The streaming API using filter - all tweets regardless of their retweet count returns a retweet count of 0 and retweet status of false.

Please help!

[RobKentTaylor]

This is still a bug for us too using the streaming API, we only get retweet_count =0 for ALL tweets coming in.
Any update on this please?

[HTSADeveloper]

I also get this issue for both retweet_count and favorite_count. I read a separate discusion which indicated that it had been resolved (https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/13501) however the issue must have recurred.

[episod]

Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place for the value.

The Streaming API is in real time. When tweets are created and streamed, their retweet_count is always zero.

The only time you’ll see a non-zero retweet_count in the Streaming API is for when you’re streamed a tweet that represents a retweet. Those tweets have a child node called “retweeted_status” that contains the original tweet that was retweeted embedded within it. The retweet_count value attached to that node represents, roughly, the number of times that original tweet has been retweeted as of some time near when you were streamed the tweet.

Retweets themselves are currently not retweetable, so should not have a non-zero retweet_count.

[DavidDiGiovanni]

If the tweet that is coming in is a retweet of a previous tweet, then the retweet_count of the original tweet should be > 0. Not sure if it is still a problem or not, but there was an issue.

I just started counting the RT’s manually as tweets come in because this number always seems to be inaccurate.

[episod]

Issues do arise – the counts are always best-effort and eventually consistent and it’s more important to us to deliver a tweet quickly than to deliver a tweet late with accurate counts.

[Jinyan0903]

yeah…but then how can we count retweet after a while? If I want to check how many retweets in this time?

I have tried Retweeted,retweet_count,it just doesn’t work