User:Rita Graca/gradproject/prototyping/twittertrends

Twitter trends

API

Cancel culture happens in Twitter through design features such as hashtags and trending topics.
To investigate better this movement, I understood I had to inform myself about which topics/people/things were being cancelled, how was the engagement with this topic, what were the language and strategies used.

Using the Twitter API I could get the current trends in the US.

Steps:

• Create a Twitter developer account
• Get keys and tokens from Twitter
• Install Ruby
• Install Twurl
• Install JQ to read JSON
• Use the command line

twurl "/1.1/trends/place.json?id=23424977" | jq

I was only interested in the trends related to cancel culture, so I used Python to develop the script a bit more.

Steps:

• use python library Tweepy
• get trends
• look for trends with words related with cancel culture

It was useful to save the trends. Instead of saving them in a .txt file, it made more sense to post them back in a Twitter account.

Steps:

• Create a status with the search results (a status is a tweet in the library)

To make it look for trends regularly I created a cron job on my computer.

46 * * * * /usr/local/bin/python3 /Users/0972516/desktop/ritaiscancelled/trends.py

Outcome: The account @CancelledWho looks for trends related to my topic and posts them. This way I can be always monitoring an important topic of my research.

Scrape from existing website

(less accurate, abandoned