I just recently finished a nearly 6 week long conversation with multiple people on Twitter. Since several things that were said were quite interesting (particularly in hindsight), I'd like to be able to archive the entire conversation for reference later. From what I can tell, there are no existing solutions similar to threadreaderapp.com to recursively unroll an entire conversation. As such, I looked into doing it in Python with the Twitter API. In researching it, I found several people saying the free version of the API only lets you search replies from the last 7 days. However, then I found some places (e.g., here) that seemed to indicate the Twitter API v2 added access to a "conversation ID" that enabled this limitation to be avoided. However, when I tried to run that code to get the replies to my tweet, the response kept coming back empty. Specifically, as best I can tell, the request from line 19 of this code (link ... which is the code from step 7 of the previously mentioned article: direct link) is not returning data.
Am I missing something? Is it possible to recursively get all replies to a tweet from the past 6 weeks without needing to be considered an "Academic Researcher" to be able to access the full Twitter archive (reference)?
Ultimately, I can get all the tweets from the website in the browser, so I suppose if I knew what I was doing I could just use some sort of a HTML scraper or something, but I don't.
The Twitter API v2 allows you to use the conversation_id
as a search parameter on both the recent search, and full archive search, endpoints. The difference is that the recent search API covers the past seven days (available in the Essential access tier / most users), and the full archive search API is limited to Academic access at this time.
So, to directly answer your question: no, the API does not allow you to recursively get all replies to a Tweet from the past 6 weeks, unless you are indeed a qualified academic researcher with access to the full archive search functionality.
Other retrieval methods are beyond the scope of the API and are not supported by Twitter.