Archive/save all of someone else's tweets

November 4, 2022 8:30 PM

With the potential demise of Twitter, I'm wondering what's gonna happen to the amazing accounts I've found over the years. How can I save the entirety of someone else's tweets, graphics included (retweets not included)? I'm thinking of people with massive archives, like 350k+ tweets. How could I save it in a way that would be easy to read, search, and maintain as a forever archive? I'm a luddite in these things.
posted by loonietrillium to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Ultimately, you'll need to use the API to extract the selected tweets. Somebody may have written a script or browser plugin to do it by now. Google is your friend to try and find those options.
posted by COD at 7:38 AM on November 5, 2022

Note that even with the API you will only be able to retrieve the last 3,200 tweets on an individual account.
posted by Aleyn at 12:24 PM on November 5, 2022

Also in general, twitter doesn't support external archives of tweets and has historically worked against such archives by disabling their API access and in some cases taking legal action against them. While you can download an archive of your own data, it's much more difficult to archive anyone else's, by design.
posted by Aleyn at 12:28 PM on November 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Wayback Machine won’t save someone's entire Tweet history, since you can only access a full Tweet history if you're logged into Twitter. But it's a starting place, at least.
posted by spiderbeforesunset at 3:19 PM on November 9, 2022