this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Just phenomenal work; how could they even scrape data? When Musk restricts the API.
Don't need API access to scrape data. That's the whole point of scraping - you're indistinguishable from regular traffic. Nitter could even impersonate a Google search crawler if they want.
I could be wrong but when looking at the changed code, it still uses a token, specifically on this line. It's possibly using user routes instead of the actual paid API, but it's hard to tell without knowing twitter's API in depth. Also it's not possible to get everything just by web scraping, especially after they locked everything behind logins. AFAIK the most you can do is impersonate search crawling and get singular tweets or profile bios.