twint

Twint, also called the Twitter Intelligence Tool, is a Python tool for pulling data from Twitter without going through Twitter's official API. Normally, if you want a program to read tweets, you have to register a developer account, get API keys, and live within rate limits and a hard 3,200-tweet history cap per user. Twint sidesteps that by talking to Twitter's public search and profile pages directly — the README's tagline is "No authentication. No API. No limits."

The tool wraps Twitter's search operators so you can collect every tweet from a specific user, every tweet that contains a keyword or hashtag, tweets sent in a certain date range, tweets near a geographic location, tweets from verified users only, and so on. It can also walk a user's followers, who they follow, and the tweets they have liked, and it can pull out sensitive-looking strings like emails and phone numbers. Results can be printed, written to a text file, exported as CSV or JSON, stored in a SQLite database, or pushed into Elasticsearch (with optional dashboards in Kibana). You can drive it from the command line or import it as a Python module and configure a Config object in code. There is also a graph-visualisation feature and an experimental tweet-translation mode.

You would reach for Twint for open-source intelligence (OSINT) work, journalism, academic research on social media, or any project where you need a lot of historical tweets and the official API's quotas get in your way. It is installed with pip and there is also a Docker image. The full README is longer than what was provided.