I am trying to retrieve the followers of @350 using the academic access and twarc2. @350 has 393K followers, but the API only finds and retrieves 9496.
twarc2 followers 350 jsonl/350_followers.jsonl
For @350Europe twarc2 finds and retrieves 13248 followers, which is the correct number.
twarc2 followers 350Europe jsonl/350Europe_followers.jsonl
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Ok, so this is an interesting edge case we though we fixed, but clearly not.
The reason is, that 350 is both a valid @350 handle, and a valid User ID 350 ! So the input is ambiguous.
https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=350 is @oof (how apt!)
https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=350 is @350
Because of the way twarc handles disambiguating this, it goes with the ID instead of the username. To force it to use @350, the workaround is to use
twarc2 user name 350
To explicitly get the user with that handle, and get the ID from the response, which is 14266598
Now you can run
twarc2 followers 14266598 jsonl/350_followers.jsonl
Which does the right thing.
In the API, the function can explicitly take a user_id or a user, but in the command line, it tries to guess, and it got it wrong that time. We’ll probably change this behaviour, and make it more explicit in a future version, it’s a rare occurrence though! Not many valid all numeric @ handles that are also valid user ids! Finally found one for testing! Thanks!
Brilliant. Thank you !
It is a very important number, so it does deserve its own handle. Very happy that there is way to handle it 
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