#1

Hello
I am a research student and for one of my studies, I examine opinion leaders in COVID-19 information on Twitter and their followers. I have a list of opinion leaders and need to identify to what percentage or number of their followers connect to them through Twitter’s who-to-follow recommendation.
Basically, I try to find the role of the algorithm and the extent of its influence on some accounts becoming the opinion leaders. I am wondering if Twitter can provide me such information.
Thank you.
Best regards
Tint

1 Like
#2

I’m not twitter but: There’s no API endpoint for this, and who-to-follow is highly personalized and it’s unknown what sort of implementation or exact accounts were shown to people over time. You can get “who to follow” suggestions for some users like this https://twitter.​com/i/connect_people?user_id=123 but this is only a partial picture. What you could do is crawl all of the opinion leaders followers, and see what accounts follow multiple ones, to see if they cluster together somehow - but you won’t be able to reliably attribute things to twitter’s Who To Follow Vs their timeline Vs any number of ways people discover accounts.

2 Likes
API for user recommendations
#3

I see. Thank you so much for your reply. I appreciate that.

#4

Not part of the official API’s but you can try out https://twitter.com/i/api/1.1/users/recommendations.json?user_id=XXXX

Note it needs an x-guest-token header as provided by https://api.twitter.com/1.1/guest/activate.json and a Bearer token for authorization.

2 Likes
#5

Thank you so much for your reply… I will try it.

#6

Please, please do NOT use endpoints that are not in the documentation.

This is an internal API that is not intended for broader usage, and may not behave in an expected manner. We will not respond to questions about such features. The endpoint may also be removed at any time, without notice, so it is not safe to build solutions (or attempt research) that rely on any such API features.

The Developer Agreement and Policy states that you will only use the documented and supported API endpoints. You may not use other endpoints.

If you would like to propose specific API feature additions (to v2 or future versions of the API) you can use the Open Evolution process.

1 Like