rtweet function 'get_followers' returning nothing

Question

I'm trying to use the rtweet package to get a list of followers from a public twitter account (for example comedian Arj Barker).

search_tweet works fine, but the get_followers returns nothing. Am I missing something?

code:

library(rtweet)

 create_token(
  app = "xxxxx",
  consumer_key = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  consumer_secret = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  access_token = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  access_secret = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx")

 test <- search_tweets("@arjbarker", n= 10)  #returns a 10 x 90 dataframe

 test2 <- get_followers('arjbarker', n = 10) returns nothing. 

Any idea what I'm doing wrong? I've tried with the user ID too, no luck. Is the function broken in the package?

Answer 1

Don't think the package/function is broken. Copy -pasting your code and adding my auth. keys worked.

library(rtweet)

create_token(
  app = "***",
  consumer_key = "***",
  consumer_secret ="***" ,
  access_token = "***" ,
  access_secret = "***")

test <- search_tweets("@arjbarker", n= 10)
test2 <- get_followers('arjbarker', n = 10)
test3 <-as.data.frame(lookup_users(test2$user_id, parse = TRUE))

Here's what test2 looks like :

test2
# A tibble: 10 x 1
   user_id            
   <chr>              
 1 777145663633125376 
 2 768214226934566912 
 3 1022674317677477888
 4 301205593          
 5 2948044568         
 6 320741531          
 7 1438157028         
 8 1157280701328187392
 9 749540126171148288 
10 1002017666033270784

Maybe try adding "@" in username; I got same results:

> test2 <- get_followers('@arjbarker', n = 10)
> test2
# A tibble: 10 x 1
   user_id            
   <chr>              
 1 777145663633125376 
 2 768214226934566912 
 3 1022674317677477888
 4 301205593          
 5 2948044568         
 6 320741531          
 7 1438157028         
 8 1157280701328187392
 9 749540126171148288 
10 1002017666033270784