twitter_blocklist

Export and import Twitter blocklists.

Execute on Google Colaboratory

It can also be used in the Google Colaboratory Notebook without installing anything in the local machine, this also includes the documentation:

Documentation and execution

It can also be executed from a Notebook, which also includes instructions for setting it up and step-by-step explanation, see:

• <run_twitter_blocklist.ipynb>

Quick reference

twitter_blocklist provides a command-line tool to export a list of all the accounts you block to a text file:

$ twitter_blocklist --export my_blocks.csv

or import a list from someone else, or downloaded from https://blocktogether.org:

$ twitter_blocklist list_to_import.csv

or block all member of a Twitter list:

$ twitter_blocklist --list <list_id>

undo blocking with the --unblock flag:

$ twitter_blocklist --unblock --list <list_id>
$ twitter_blocklist --unblock list_to_unblock.csv

Consider that Twitter rate-limits their APIs, I have setup the client to automatically sleep in case of a rate-limiting error, in case that happens, just leave the script running and it will complete at some point. For example exporting the blocks needs to make 1 request every 5000 blocked IDs, so you could hit the limit of 15 requests every 15 minutes, in that case the script will sleep for 15 minutes and then resume.

Install

$ pip install twitter_blocklist

Initial setup

Create a Twitter app following the instructions from the python-twitter project

Create a text file named twitter_keys.toml with this format:

consumer_key='xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
consumer_secret='xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
access_token_key='xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
access_token_secret='xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'

Make sure you have the single quotes.

From the same folder where you have twitter_keys.toml, run the tool as shown above.