Use twitter from R. Get started by reading vignette("rtweet").

To get the current released version from CRAN:

install.packages("rtweet")

You can install the development version of rtweet from GitHub with:

install.packages("rtweet", repos = 'https://ropensci.r-universe.dev')

All users must be authenticated to interact with Twitter’s APIs. The easiest way to authenticate is to use your personal twitter account - this will happen automatically (via a browser popup) the first time you use an rtweet function. See auth_setup_default() for details. Using your personal account is fine for casual use, but if you are trying to collect a lot of data it’s a good idea to authenticate with your own Twitter “app”. See vignette("auth", package = "rtweet") for details.

library(rtweet)

rtweet should be used in strict accordance with Twitter’s developer terms.

Search for up to 1000 tweets containing #rstats, the common hashtag used to refer to the R language, excluding retweets:

rt <- search_tweets("#rstats", n = 1000, include_rts = FALSE)

Twitter rate limits cap the number of search results returned to 18,000 every 15 minutes. To request more than that, set retryonratelimit = TRUE and rtweet will wait for rate limit resets for you.

Search for 200 users with the #rstats in their profile:

useRs <- search_users("#rstats", n = 200)

Randomly sample (approximately 1%) from the live stream of all tweets:

random_stream <- stream_tweets("")

Stream all geo-located tweets from London for 60 seconds:

stream_london <- stream_tweets(location = lookup_coords("london"), timeout = 60)

Get all accounts followed by a user:

## get user IDs of accounts followed by R Foundation
R_Foundation_fds <- get_friends("_R_Foundation")

## lookup data on those accounts
R_Foundation_fds_data <- lookup_users(R_Foundation_fds$to_id)

Get all accounts following a user:

## get user IDs of accounts following R Foundation
R_Foundation_flw <- get_followers("_R_Foundation", n = 100)
R_Foundation_flw_data <- lookup_users(R_Foundation_flw$from_id)

If you want all followers, you'll need to set n = Inf and retryonratelimit = TRUE but be warned that this might take a long time.

Get the most recent 200 tweets from R Foundation:

## get user IDs of accounts followed by R Foundation
tmls <- get_timeline("_R_Foundation", n = 100)

Get the 10 most recently favorited statuses by R Foundation:

favs <- get_favorites("_R_Foundation", n = 10)

Communicating with Twitter’s APIs relies on an internet connection, which can sometimes be inconsistent.

If you have questions, or need an example or want to share a use case, you can post them on rOpenSci’s discuss. Where you can browse uses of rtweet too.

With that said, if you encounter an obvious bug for which there is not already an active issue, please create a new issue with all code used (preferably a reproducible example) on Github.

Please note that this package is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.