Ch 6.2.2 Demo & Practice: Tweet Sources#

Let’s now try out some code to see what device people are using to post their Tweets. We can’t look at Donald Trump’s Tweets, since his account was suspended in January 2021 for inciting violence, but we can look at other accounts and think about authenticity might mean for different types of accounts.

Log into Twitter#

These are our normal steps get Tweepy loaded and logged into Twitter

import tweepy

(optional) make a fake twitter connection with the fake_tweepy library

For testing purposes, we’ve added this line of code, which loads a fake version of tweepy, so it wont actually connect to twitter. If you want to try to actually connect to twitter, don’t run this line of code.

%run ../../fake_tweepy/fake_tweepy.ipynb
Fake tweepy is replacing the tweepy library. Fake Tweepy doesn't need real passwords, and prevents you from accessing real twitter
# Load all your developer access passwords into Python
# TODO: Put your twitter account's special developer access passwords below:
bearer_token = "n4tossfgsafs_fake_bearer_token_isa53#$%$"
consumer_key = "sa@#4@fdfdsa_fake_consumer_key_$%DSG#%DG"
consumer_secret = "45adf$T$A_fake_consumer_secret_JESdsg"
access_token = "56sd5Ss4tsea_fake_access_token_%YE%hDsdr"
access_token_secret = "j^$dr_fake_consumer_key_^A5s#DR5s"

# Give the tweepy code your developer access passwords so
# it can perform twitter actions
client = tweepy.Client(
   bearer_token=bearer_token,
   consumer_key=consumer_key, consumer_secret=consumer_secret,
   access_token=access_token, access_token_secret=access_token_secret
)
Fake Tweepy is pretending to log in to twitter

Load tweets with the source (what device they were posted on)#

The code below searches for recent tweets from an account, and then does a loop though all the tweets, printing out the source device of the Tweet and then the tweet itself. Hopefully most of the code looks familiar from last chapter when we covered loops over social media data.

Try searching for recent tweets from different types of accounts, like:

  • News organizations and other corporations, like: cnn

  • Politicians, like: BarackObama, JoeBiden,

  • Other celebrities, like MarkRuffalo, selenagomez

To do this:

  • put in your special Twitter bot passwords

  • skip the fake_tweepy step above

  • take the first line of the code below and replace 'from:fake_celebrity' with something like 'from:cnn'

# choose account to search from (save in query variable)
query = 'from:fake_celebrity'

# search tweets with the query, also include the "source" info, and allow up to 20 results
# note: "search_recent_tweets" searches tweets from the last 7 days
tweets = client.search_recent_tweets(query=query, tweet_fields=["source"], max_results=20)

# loop through each of the tweets (saved in tweets.data)
for tweet in tweets.data:
    print("Tweet Source: " + tweet.source) # print the source publishing the tweet
    print("   Tweet: " + tweet.text) # print the text of the tweet
    print() # print a blank line
Fake Tweepy is pretending to search for 'from:fake_celebrity' and is returning some fake tweets.
Tweet Source: Twitter for iPhone
   Tweet: Why is the line at the grocery store taking so long???

Tweet Source: Fake Social Media Manager
   Tweet: Remember, my show tonight starts at 7:00pm!

Tweet Source: Fake Social Media Manager
   Tweet: Hope all my followers are having a lovely day!

Reflecting on what you find#

In our fake_celebrity example, you will see that some of the tweets are posted from a Social Media Manager, a program that helps people schedule posts and otherwise manage their social media accounts.

Reflect on what you feel that social media manager means for authenticity for different types of accounts.