Creating a Script to Pull Data from Twitter API: As Explained through Elon Musk Account Metrics

I am fascinated by Twitter.

I recently built a project that pulls data from the Twitter API for metadata about accounts. The functionality is written to allow data to be updated with the click of a button.

Twitter data can be used to harvest data about detailed account-level metrics. In this article, I am going to discuss two common endpoints: /Get/Followers and Get/Following.

Top 5 Most Followed Accounts:

First, let’s look at the 5 most followed accounts. Props to Barack Obama for being the most followed account on Twitter. Interestingly, 3 of the top 5 are musicians.

1. @barackobama — 133 million followers
2. @elonmusk — 119 million
3. @justinbieber— 113 million
4. @katyperry — 108 million
5. @rihanna — 107 million

Let’s call this endpoint on Elon Musk’s account see the account-level metrics for him:

{ data: { username: ‘elonmusk’, 
  name: ‘Elon Musk’, id: ‘44196397’, 
  created_at: ‘2009–06–02T20:12:29.000Z’, 
  public_metrics: { 
            followers_count: 119375032, 
            following_count: 130, 
            tweet_count: 20855, 
            listed_count: 103808 }, 
    description: ‘’, 
    verified: true } }

Here we learn that Musk’s account was created in June 2009. He has tweeted over 20,000 times. He has a large following and he is following 130 accounts .

Video Demo of the Application:

Goals of the Application:

1. Call the ‘User’ endpoint https://api.twitter.com/2/users/by/username/

System Design Diagram of Twitter:

Shout out to venerable NeetCode. He puts up nice technical CS videos like the one below.

System Design Posted by NeetCode

Usage of the Twitter API:

As I am building an app to automate data from the Twitter API which is where the data is stored––on Twitter’s servers––and storing it in a JavaScript variable and then printing it in a Google spreadsheet.

Interesting Analytics:

As we can see in the above video, the Twitter API is saying that Musk has 119,396,818 followers.

My account @bazill_thg is listed as 373 followers.

Link to my Twitter account: Basil Latif

Code to Get Following Information:

The Twitter API allows us to learn about who an account follows.

Here, I define a url which populates from an ID (linked to an account username) from the sheet. Then, the script calls the URL with the required headers.

var url = "https://api.twitter.com/2/users/" + current_id + "/following?max_results=1000"
//writing the call
 var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, {
     headers: {
               Authorization: 'Bearer ' + bearer_token
                },
                'method' : 'get',
                'contentType' : 'application/json'
      });

Which is then parsed with the following code:

var json_response = JSON.parse(response);
var follower_arr = json_response['data']
console.log(json_response)

Which yields the following object array:

{ data: [ { id: ‘16076032’, name: ‘Glenn Greenwald’, username: ‘ggreenwald’ },
 { id: ‘3072160164’, name: ‘John Kraus’, username: ‘johnkrausphotos’ }, 
{ id: ‘17842366’, name: ‘Discovery’, username: ‘Discovery’ }, 
{ id: ‘1592542747726069766’, name: ‘Sandy Munro’, username: ‘teardowntitan’ },
 { id: ‘4767021’, name: ‘𝙺𝚒𝚖𝚋𝚊𝚕 𝙼𝚞𝚜𝚔 🤠’, username: ‘kimbal’ },
{ id: ‘1663172653’, name: ‘Terrible Maps’, username: ‘TerribleMaps’ }, 
{ id: ‘5405152’, name: ‘D.A. Wallach’, username: ‘dawallach’ }, 
{ id: ‘3918111614’, name: ‘Oriol Vinyals’, username: ‘OriolVinyalsML’ }, 
{ id: ‘945817135816654848’, name: ‘Trung Phan’, username: ‘TrungTPhan’ }, 
{ id: ‘4885277053’, name: ‘Daily Stoic’, username: ‘dailystoic’ } ], 
meta: { result_count: 10, next_token: ‘81EN4U1D2L1HGZZZ’ } }

This represents accounts that Mr. Musk is following.

Analyzing A Sample of 9 accounts that Elon Musk follows:

1 — Glenn Greenwald: journalist

2 — John Kraus: spaceflight photographer

3 — Sandy Monro: founder of Munro & Associates

4 — Kimbal Musk: entreprenuer (brother)

5 — Terrible Maps:

6 — D.A. Wallach: Life sciences & healthcare investor.

7 — Oriol Vinyals: RD & Deep Learning Lead @DeepMind

8 — Trung Phan: writer

9 — Daily Stoic: philosophy bot

Musk seems to be interested in a broad array of types of accounts if one trusts this random sample I’ve extracted. Musk seems to follow journalists/photographers; entrepreneurs and businesspeople, and an assortment of other writers and thinkers.

Implications on Broader Society:

This software architecture can enable one to interact and communicate with a potentially large number of people through mining Twitter usernames.

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