Use Tweepy to extract Twitter follower information (API incompatibility issues)? - twitter

Question

I was following this tutorial, https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-download-twitter-friends-or-followers-for-free-b9d5ac23812, which was written in 2021. It should've worked fine, however, they have to 'fix' the things that just work.
Specifically, running this line
for fid in Cursor(api.followers_ids, screen_name=screen_name, count=5000).items():
ids.append(fid)
gives the error:
"tweepy.error.TweepError: [{'message': 'You currently have Essential access which includes access to Twitter API v2 endpoints only. If you need access to this endpoint, you’ll need to apply for Elevated access via the Developer Portal. You can learn more here: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-started/about-twitter-api#v2-access-leve', 'code': 453}]"
I could have pulled the data in five minutes. Now debugging this already cost one hour+ because they just break the things that work. Is there anyway to make this old code snippet work? The application to use API 1.1 takes weeks, and I don't have time to watch their bad documents of how to migrate from API 1.1 to 2.0 and then the documents of migrating from Tweepy 3.9.0 to 4.0.0. Five minutes' task would just become half a day. Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

First of all, have you at least tried to apply for the Elevated access?
It can take some time, it's true, but it can also be instantaneous.
The other solution would be to use the Twitter API V2.
You don't need any tutorial, just read the documentation:
Here for the authentication ;
Here for the retrieval of the followers ;
Here for the pagination.
And you should get something like that:
import tweepy
client = tweepy.Client("Bearer Token here")
paginator = tweepy.Paginator(
client.get_users_followers,
id=..., # ID only, no screename
max_results=1000
).flatten()
for follower in paginator:
print(follower.id)
Finally, even if I understand your frustration (and developing Twitter applications can be very frustrating), I think that you should try to keep it out your SO questions. Good luck!