8.2. Data From the Twitter API

When we’ve been accessing Twitter through Python and the “tweepy” code library. The tweepy code library works by sending requests across the internet to twitter, using what is called an “application programming interface” or API for short. APIs have a set of rules for what requests you can make, what happens when you make the request, and what information you can get back.

If you are interested in learning more about what you can do with tweepy and what information you can get back, you can look at the official documentation for those. But be warned they are not organized in a friendly way for newcomers and take some getting used to to figure out what these documentation pages are talking about.

So, if you are interested, you can look at the tweepy library documentation to see what tweepy functions you can run and what requests they make of the twitter API.

You can also look at information on the data that you can get from the Twitter API by looking at the Twitter API Documentation. For example, you can look at the documentation for getting a Tweet, and see that you can get public metrics of a Tweet (likes, replies, etc.), and if you are the owner of the tweet you can get private “organic” metrics (how many people saw the tweet, how many clicked the to see the profile of the person who made the tweet, etc.).

The Twitter API lets you access just some of the data that Twitter tacks, but Twitter and other social media platforms track much more than they let you have access to.