Thread by @conspirator0

It's possible to automate this technique and download most or all of an account's tweets archived on Wayback Machine/Internet Archive. Here's how to write a basic Python program to download the tweets and store them as a CSV file.

(Pastebin link to source code at end of thread)

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1464765596156014594

Step 1: read the list of all the Wayback Machine archives of the account in question. The URL used is the same call the Wayback Machine website uses, but the maximum number of results has been bumped to 1 million.(Wayback Machine defaults to 10K max results.)

Step 2: filter the results to archives of individual tweets or replies (throwing away things like archives of someone's profile etc). Tweets from before Twitter switched to using Snowflake IDs (November 2011 blog.twitter.com/engineering/en…) are also discarded.

Step 3: loop through the archived tweet URLs and download the actual content from Wayback Machine. This step is slow (1000-2000 tweets downloaded per hour) and a variety of optimizations could likely be made, such as parallelizing it.

Step 4: parse the downloaded tweet archives, which is clunky due to the need to handle multiple versions of the Twitter website. Tweet timestamps are extracted from tweet IDs (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake…) to avoid dealing with time zones/geographic variation in date/time formatting.

Here's a Pastebin link to the complete source code for the Wayback Machine tweet downloader, presented with the disclaimer that although it currently works pretty well (albeit slowly), future changes to either Twitter or Wayback Machine could break it.
pastebin.com/MUMsQ0sj