In mkearney/tweetbotornot2: Detect Twitter Bots

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

This vignette offers some guidance (with working example) on how to collect bot estimates (and, optionally, Twitter timeline data) for a large number of users.

## load package
library(tweetbotornot2)

Example data

For example purposes, this vignette retrieves user IDs from accounts appearing on a Twitter list of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

## get accounts from the twitter list: twitter.com/kearneymw/lists/dems-pres-2020
d20 <- rtweet::lists_members(owner_user = "kearneymw", slug = "dems-pres-2020")

## preview data
head(d20[, c("screen_name", "description")])

## store user IDs as 'users' vector
users <- d20$user_id

Bulk downloading

To get estimates for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of users, it is wise to use a for-loop and wait for the rate limit reset by sleeping between calls. This can be done in a number of ways, but the functions chunk_users() and chunk_users_data() are provided to make this easier. The code below should work for either user or bearer (rtweet) token. It also provides a safety oops counter and prints out rate limit and percent complete information.

## convert users vector (user IDs or screen names) a list of 10-user chunks
users <- chunk_users(users, n = 10)

## initialize output vector
output <- vector("list", length(users))


for (i in seq_along(output)) {
  ## set oops counter
  oops <- 0L

  ## check rate limit- if < 10 calls remain, sleep until reset
  print(rl <- rtweet::rate_limit(query = "get_timelines"))
  while (rl[["remaining"]] < 10L) {
    ## prevent infinite loop
    oops <- oops + 1L
    if (oops > 3L) {
      stop("rate_limit() isn't returning rate limit data", call. = FALSE)
    }
    cat("Sleeping for", round(max(as.numeric(rl[["reset"]], "mins"), 0.5), 1), "minutes...")
    Sys.sleep(max(as.numeric(rl[["reset"]], "secs"), 30))
    rl <- rtweet::rate_limit(query = "get_timelines")
  }

  ## get bot estimates
  output[[i]] <- predict_bot(users[[i]])

  ## print iteration update
  cat(sprintf("%d / %d (%.f%%)\n", i, length(output), i / length(output) * 100))
}

## merge into single data table
output <- do.call("rbind", output)

## sort by bot probability
output[order(-prob_bot), ]

If you'd also like to keep the raw (timeline) Twitter data, the above for loop can be modified to collect the Twitter data prior to generating estimates with predict_bot(). This is demonstrated in the code below.

## convert users vector (user IDs or screen names) a list of 10-user chunks
users <- chunk_users(users, n = 10)

## initialize output vectors
output <- vector("list", length(users))
usrtml <- vector("list", length(users))

for (i in seq_along(output)) {
  ## set oops counter
  oops <- 0L

  ## check rate limit- if < 10 calls remain, sleep until reset
  print(rl <- rtweet::rate_limit(query = "get_timelines"))
  while (rl[["remaining"]] < 10L) {
    ## prevent infinite loop
    oops <- oops + 1L
    if (oops > 3L) {
      stop("rate_limit() isn't returning rate limit data", call. = FALSE)
    }
    cat("Sleeping for", round(max(as.numeric(rl[["reset"]], "mins"), 0.5), 1), "minutes...")
    Sys.sleep(max(as.numeric(rl[["reset"]], "secs"), 30))
    rl <- rtweet::rate_limit(query = "get_timelines")
  }

  ## get user timeline data (set check=FALSE to avoid excessive rate-limit calls)
  usrtml[[i]] <- rtweet::get_timelines(users[[i]], n = 200, check = FALSE)

  ## use the timeline data to get bot estimates
  output[[i]] <- predict_bot(users[[i]])

  ## print iteration update
  cat(sprintf("%d / %d (%.f%%)\n", i, length(output), i / length(output) * 100))
}

## merge both data lists into single data tables
output <- do.call("rbind", output)
usrtml <- do.call("rbind", usrtml)

## sort by bot probability
output[order(-prob_bot), ]

## preview timeline data
usrtml[1:10, ]

Bulk processing

If you've already collected lots of user timeline data, the processing of timeline data into numeric feature data can still be computationally intensive. To deal with this, the feature engineering function, preprocess_bot(), includes a batch_size argument, which allows you to specify how many users should be processed at a time. You can adjust the size to optimize to your machine.

preprocess_bot(usrtml, batch_size = 200)

¹ Unless you've already collected user timeline data, {tweetbotornot2} relies on {rtweet} to pull data from Twitter's REST API.

² The first time you make a request [from your computer] to Twitter's API's, a browser should pop-up, asking you to authorize the app. After that, the authorization token is stored and remembered behind the scenes (you will only have to reauthorize the app if your Twitter settings or token credentials get reset or if you use a different machine).

mkearney/tweetbotornot2 documentation built on Feb. 22, 2020, 2:32 a.m.