Twitter provides a useful public API for accessing Tweets, but it does have rate limits in place to prevent abuse. As you design your Twitter scraping project, here are some key factors to consider to maximize the amount of data you can collect.
Twitter API Rate Limits
The main limit is that you can make 450 requests every 15 minutes per access token. Each request can return up to 100 Tweets. So in theory, you could collect 45,000 Tweets every 15 minutes with a single access token.
Of course, collecting at that rate consistently is not realistic - you'd quickly run out of matching Tweets for most queries. But it shows the upper bound of what's possible.
Optimizing Your Data Collection
Here are some tips to optimize your scraping:
Ethical Considerations
When scraping Tweets, be transparent in how you use the data and respect user privacy. Stick to Twitter's API terms and conditions.
With some thoughtful planning around these rate limit constraints, you can retrieve a significant amount of quality Twitter data for analysis. The key is using the right combination of access tokens, selective queries, code-side filtering, and scheduled requests to make the most of your limits.