Twayback: Downloading deleted Tweets from the Wayback Machine, made easy

Finding and downloading deleted Tweets takes a lot of time. Thankfully, with this tool, it becomes a piece of cake! 🎂

Twayback is a portmanteau of Twitter and the Wayback Machine. Enter your desired Twitter username, and let Twayback do the rest!

Features

Can download some or all of a user's archived deleted Tweets.
Lets you extract Tweets text to a text file (yes, even quote retweets!)
Has ability to screenshot deleted Tweets.
Allows custom time range to narrow search for deleted Tweets archived between two dates.
Differentiates between accounts that are active, suspended, or don't/no longer exist.
Lets you know if a target handle's archived Tweets have been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

Usage

twayback -u USERNAME [OPTIONS]

-u, --username                                        Specify target user's Twitter handle

-from, --fromdate                                     Narrow search for deleted Tweets *archived*
                                                      on and after this date
                                                      (can be combined with -to)
                                                      (format YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY/MM/DD
                                                      or YYYYMMDD, doesn't matter)
                                        
-to, --todate                                         Narrow search for deleted Tweets *archived*
                                                      on and before this date
                                                      (can be combined with -from)
                                                      (format YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY/MM/DD
                                                      or YYYYMMDD, doesn't matter)
Examples:
twayback -u taylorswift13                             Downloads all of @taylorswift13's
                                                      deleted Tweets

twayback -u jack -from 2022-01-05                     Downloads all of @jack's
                                                      deleted Tweets
                                                      *archived* since January 5,
                                                      2022 until now

twayback -u drake -to 2022/02/09                      Downloads all of @drake's
                                                      deleted Tweets *archived*
                                                      since the beginning until
                                                      February 9, 2022

twayback -u EA -from 2020-08-30 -to 2020-09-15        Downloads all of @EA's
                                                      deleted Tweets *archived*
                                                      between August 30, 2020 to
                                                      September 15, 2020

Installation

For Windows only

Download the latest EXE file.
Launch Command Prompt in the EXE file's directory.
Run the command twayback -u USERNAME (Replace USERNAME with your target handle).

For Windows, Linux, and macOS

Download the latest Python script ZIP file.
Extract ZIP file to a directory of your choice.
Open terminal in that directory.
Run the command pip install -r requirements.txt.
Run the command twayback.py -u USERNAME (Replace USERNAME with your target handle).

For more information, check out the Usage section above.

Screenshots

(I'm aware that screenshots for pre-2016 Tweets aren't working. I'm currently trying my best to fix it, but I've been running into errors. As soon as I fix it, I will ship a version that works for all Tweets. Thanks for your patience!)

Screenshots are done using Playwright. To successfully take screenshots, please follow these steps:

Open a terminal window.
Run: playwright install.

Things to keep in mind

Quality of the HTML files depends on how the Wayback Machine saved them. Some are better than others.
This tool is best for text. You might have some luck with photos. You cannot download videos.
By definition, if an account is suspended or no longer exists, all their Tweets would be considered deleted.
Custom date range is not about when Tweets were made, but rather when they were archived. For example, a Tweet from 2011 may have been archived today.

Call for help 🙏

I welcome, and encourage, contributions! They make my day. What I can think of off the top of my head:

Increasing download speed: It'd be nice to increase the speed at which files are downloaded. requests takes me 5 seconds to download a file in kilobytes. There exist faster alternatives to requests, such as pycURL, faster_than_requests, and urllib3. I haven't gotten them to successfully work. I just want to use the faster library to download the HTML files and parse the text, it's okay if the rest is done with requests.
Code simplification/improvement: If you're a pro at Python and know better ways to do what's in the script, please feel free to do so! If it works well, if not better, I will most likely merge it 😃
Merging Twayback A and B: I would love help on combining both scripts. It's time consuming to edit and compile two scripts simultaneously. It can also be confusing for newcomers. One way I'm thinking of is to give the user an option from the start to call either Twayback A's .py file or Twayback B's .py file. By having a main.py, I can then compile using pyInstaller both versions into one executable. (thanks to @humandecoded for his valuable contributions that made this possible!)
async/await: This one is badly needed. I'm trying to create another version of the script that doesn't check the status code of every archived URL. Rather, it gets the list of archived URLs from the Wayback Machine, gets the list of online URLs from the Twitter profile, subtracts both, and splits the Twitter URLs to get their IDs to serve as filenames. All of this can be pretty slow without async/await. I tried implementing it, but I suck at it, and I don't know where to put what. Multithreading and multiprocessing are also good. ✅ (thanks to @humandecoded !)

lowgun / twayback