// the find
twintproject/twint
An advanced Twitter scraping & OSINT tool written in Python that doesn't use Twitter's API, allowing you to scrape a user's followers, following, Tweets and more while evading most API limitations.
Twint is a Python tool for scraping Twitter data without using the official API, aimed at OSINT researchers and developers who need historical tweet data beyond API limits. It works by reverse-engineering Twitter's web search endpoints rather than authenticated API calls. As of 2026, it is effectively dead — Twitter/X's platform changes in 2023 broke the scraping approach it relied on.
The CLI is genuinely well-designed with a lot of filtering options (geo, date ranges, language, phone/email extraction) that covered real OSINT use cases. Support for multiple output formats (SQLite, Elasticsearch, CSV, JSON) made it easy to pipe into downstream analysis. The async architecture using aiohttp was a reasonable choice for I/O-bound scraping at scale. The Elasticsearch integration with pre-built Kibana dashboards was a nice touch for anyone doing volume analysis.
It has been broken since early 2023 and is not maintained — Twitter's API monetization changes and frontend restructuring killed the scraping surface this tool depended on. Last commit was February 2023 and the issue tracker is full of 'not working' reports with no responses. Installing it is already painful (the README itself tells you to use Docker because pip installs are broken). Architecting anything around this today means you're building on top of a dead library against a platform that has actively hardened against this kind of access.