auth

library(tweetbotornot2)

This vignette provides background and addresses commonissues related to obtaining access (authorization) to Twitter’s APIs. It also introduces two authorization methods–the default (user) authorization method and the application-only (bearer) authorization method–and explains some key differences between the two.

Authentication

Use of {tweetbotornot} typically¹ requires, at a minimum, (a) internet connection and (b) an active Twitter account. The latter is needed because Twitter requires authentication prior to use of their REST API. As a result, to use key functions of {tweetbotornot}, users must either approve the embedded {rtweet} rstats2twitter application (this allows {rtweet} to communicate from R to Twitter’s APIs) or provide their own application and account credentials. If a user is already signed into Twitter in their default web browser, this can be done with a single click. Otherwise, users must sign-in to Twitter and then click.

Saving/using Twitter API token

If you’re working in an interactive R session on a local machine (in the RStudio application, for example), this process should be relatively straight forward.¹ However, if you’re working on a remote server or in the cloud (in RStudio Server, for example), then it’s a bit trickier. The easiest solution is to start a local, interactive session of R and then do the following:

1. On a machine with a local version of R, send API request via {rtweet}

   rstats <- rtweet::search_tweets("rstats")

2. The above code actually creates (as a side effect) a Twitter token for you. So, on the same machine, save the token as an .rds file

   saveRDS(rtweet::get_token(), "rtweet_token.rds")

3. Upload the saved token file to your cloud/server

4. Once the token is uploaded to the cloud, you can read the token file and specify the resulting object in each {tweetbotornot} call, e.g.,

   token <- readRDS("rtweet_token.rds")
   predict_bot("jack", token = token)

   or set the path to the saved token as an R environment variable. The latter option (example below) allows you to avoid having to specify the token each time.

   Sys.setenv(TWITTER_PAT = "/path/to/rtweet_token.rds")
   predict_bot("jack")

   or set the R environment variable for current and future sessions (on a given machine), you can also try tfse::set_renv().

   tfse::set_renv(TWITTER_PAT = "/path/to/rtweet_token.rds")

Authorization methods & rate limits

Assuming users haven’t made any recent calls to Twitter’s API, the predict functions described earlier should work for up to 900 users at a time. For some users (e.g., those with a Twitter token created using credentials from their own Twitter application or tokens created at a time of sufficiently provided permissions by the embedded rtweet app) it’s possible to get estimates for up to 1,500 accounts at a time using Twitter’s application-only (bearer) token. Converting a normal user token into a bearer token requires an access level of "read-write-directmessages". The code below should print the access level associated with your current token.

## view access level of current token
print(rtweet:::api_access_level())

The drawback to the application-only authorization method is that your requests will contain no information about the authenticating user. The upside to this kind of token is access to a different set of rate limits. The different rate limits aren’t always desirable (compared to the normal user token), but for the some endpoints–like users/timelines (900 vs. 1,500 requests per 15 min.) and search/tweets (18,000 vs. 45,000 requests per 15 min.)–the difference is quite significant.

If the output from the above code was "read-write-directmessages", then users can specify the bearer token via rtweet::bearer_token() for the token argument in bot-predicting calls. The code below, for example, checks the bearer token rate limit before and after executing predict_bot().

## check bearer token rate limit
rtweet::rate_limit(rtweet::bearer_token(), "get_timeline")

## get bot estimates for two users
predict_bot(c("netflix_bot", "PatrickMahomes"), token = rtweet::bearer_token())

## re-check bearer token rate limit
rtweet::rate_limit(rtweet::bearer_token(), "get_timeline")