How to scrape X (Twitter) followings without getting blocked

Pulling Twitter followings data by hand does not scale. You either copy-paste it one item at a time, or you fight the API — rate limits, auth, and pagination — and still end up with half the fields missing. For a social media manager, the data only matters if it is complete, fresh, and in a sheet you can act on. That is the gap Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles closes.

Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles runs 206 times a month on Apify.

What you get

Export a bounded, deduplicated list of accounts followed by a public Twitter/X profile
Accept usernames, profile URLs, and numeric user IDs; download profile records as JSON, CSV, or Excel
deduplicated list of accounts followed by a public Twitter/X profile. Accept usernames

Instead of building a scraper, you point Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles (data-slayer/twitter-followings) at your input and run it. It handles the requests, retries, and parsing, and returns one clean row per item in the format you already use.

How it works — step by step

1. Open the actor Go to data-slayer/twitter-followings and click Try for free.

2. Paste your input

{
  "userId": "elonmusk"
}

3. Run it Click Start. A typical run finishes in under a minute and returns one row per item.

4. Get your data Download as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or push straight to Google Sheets / Airtable via the built-in integrations.

What the output looks like

Field	Example	Use it for
`url`	`https://…/item/ABC123`	link back to the source
`caption`	`"…"`	content analysis
`engagement`	`…`	filter / sort / export
`collectedAt`	`2026-09-30T12:00:00Z`	time-series / scheduling

Why scraping Twitter followings without getting blocked is hard in 2026

Twitter is one of the most aggressively defended sites on the web, and 2026 is the hardest year yet to pull Twitter data at scale. If you have tried to scrape Twitter yourself, you have probably already hit one of these walls:

Anti-bot detection. Twitter fingerprints the TLS handshake, the HTTP headers, and the request timing of every client. A plain requests call is flagged before it ever reaches a public profile, and you get blocked with a login wall or an empty response.
Rate limits. The public endpoints throttle by IP and by session. Hit the rate limit and the API returns errors for minutes; ignore it and the account or IP is temporarily banned.
Login walls and cookies. Many surfaces (stories, some reels, follower lists) are only served to a logged-in session, so a naive scraper needs a real login, a cookie jar, and a way to refresh it — which is exactly what gets accounts disabled.
Pagination and shifting JSON. Twitter changes its private JSON shape without notice, so a scraper you wrote last quarter silently returns half the fields today.

That is the difference between a script that works once on your laptop and a Twitter scraper that runs every day without maintenance. For a followings job you do not want to babysit proxies, cookies, and retries — you want the rows.

Three ways to get Twitter data — and which one to use

There are three honest ways to get Twitter followings data in 2026. Each has a real cost.

Several platform nodes connected to one hub

Approach	How it works	The catch
Build your own scraper	Write a Python scraper with `requests`, rotate residential proxies, manage a login session, parse the private JSON	Weeks of work, constant breakage, and you own the block/ban risk. Fine for a one-off, painful at scale.
Official Twitter API	Use the platform’s own API	Heavily restricted, requires app review, returns a fraction of the public fields, and is not built for bulk extraction.
A ready-made scraping API / actor	Point a maintained actor at your input and download clean rows	You pay per result, but you skip the proxy, login, and parsing work entirely.

For most followings work the third option wins on total cost. A scraping API gives you the same public Twitter data a hand-built Python scraper would, without the account-handling system around it. Apify hosts these actors and exposes them through a web scraping API, so you can run one by hand, on a schedule, or from code with the Apify API.

How to scrape Twitter followings without getting blocked

If you do build your own Twitter scraper, these are the controls that actually keep it alive. Every one of them is already handled for you inside a maintained actor.

Use residential proxies. Datacenter IP ranges are blocked on sight. Rotate residential proxies per request so no single IP crosses the rate limit.
Respect the rate limit. Throttle to a concurrency the target tolerates, and back off exponentially when you see a 429. A conservative rate limit beats a fast ban.
Send real headers and a warm session. Match a browser’s headers, keep a cookie jar, and reuse a session instead of opening a cold connection every call.
Retry with jitter. Transient failures are normal; retry with exponential backoff and random jitter, and treat an empty body as a failure, not a result.
Page carefully. Follow cursors to the end, dedupe by id, and stop cleanly when the feed ends — do not hammer the same page.
Cache what you already have. Re-fetch only new items. Most “blocks” are self-inflicted by re-scraping the same public profile hundreds of times.

Do all six and you can scrape Twitter without getting blocked for a while. Do none of them and you will get blocked on day one. That maintenance burden is the real reason teams move to a hosted Twitter scraper instead of owning the plumbing.

What you can do with Twitter followings data

Once the rows land in a sheet, the data does the work. Four patterns we see most:

An API request flowing into an endpoint and returning records

Competitor benchmarking. Track the engagement metrics of a competitor’s public posts over time and see what format wins in your niche.
Creator and lead discovery. Pull the public profiles behind a hashtag or keyword and build a shortlist of creators to work with.
Content research. Export the top posts for a topic, cluster their captions and hashtags, and use the winners as a brief for your own content.
Reporting and monitoring. Schedule the actor daily, push to Google Sheets, and let a dashboard refresh itself instead of paying an analyst to copy-paste numbers.

All of it runs on public data — no login, no personal data, and no private accounts.

Is scraping Twitter followings legal?

Scraping public Twitter data is generally lawful in most jurisdictions, but the rules are not uniform and they change. A few principles keep you on the right side of it:

Public data only. If a field is visible to a logged-out visitor, it is fair game in most readings; private profiles, DMs, and anything behind a login are not.
Mind privacy law. GDPR, CCPA, and similar regimes still govern how you store and process personal data even when you collected it lawfully. Do not build profiles of individuals from public data without a lawful basis.
Respect terms and robots. Follow the platform’s terms and its robots.txt, and never use scraped data to harass, spam, or re-identify people.
Keep it proportionate. A steady, modest rate limit is both more ethical and more durable than a burst that degrades the service for everyone.

This article is not legal advice. When the use case is commercial and the data is personal, get a lawyer’s read before you scale.

Best Twitter scraper: how to choose one in 2026

Search for the best Twitter scraper and you get a wall of tools. The best Twitter scraper for your job comes down to four questions:

Two options weighed side by side

Does it run logged out? If a tool needs your Twitter login, it is putting your account at risk. A good Twitter scraper reads public data without a session.
Does it handle the blocking for you? Residential proxies, retries, and pacing should be the tool’s problem, not yours.
Does it return the fields you need? A tool that returns ten fields when you need fifty is a false economy.
Can you schedule it? The value compounds when the data refreshes itself.

Across the Twitter scrapers in 2026, the ones that last are maintained, logged-out, and API-first. That is the design of the actor on this page.

What you can extract from Twitter URLs, posts, reels and hashtags

The unit of work is a Twitter URL or handle. From those you can extract Twitter data across every public surface:

Posts and reels — captions, media, view counts, and engagement metrics.
Comments — the public comment thread, with authors and timestamps.
Hashtags — the public posts behind a hashtag, for trend and creator research.
Profiles — the public profile fields a logged-out visitor can see.

You hand the actor the Twitter URLs you care about and it returns one row per item. Because it is a single Twitter scraper API, the same call works for posts, reels, comments, and hashtags — you do not stitch together four tools.

Twitter scraping API vs Bright Data vs a custom build

If you have looked at Bright Data or another scraping API, the trade-off is the same everywhere: a web scraping API sells you the unblocking layer, and you still own the parsing. A hosted Twitter scraper API goes one step further — it returns the parsed followings rows, not just the HTML.

	Custom Python build	Bright Data / raw proxy	Hosted actor
Unblocking	you build it	included	included
Parsing to fields	you build it	you build it	included
Maintenance	ongoing	low	vendor
Time to first row	days	hours	minutes

Social media scraping is a maintenance problem, not a one-off script. The cheapest line item is almost never the one that costs you a week of engineering every quarter.

Twitter followings terms, explained

A quick reference for the terms this guide uses:

user profile — the public profile or page you point the actor at. A run returns user profile for every row.
bio — part of the Twitter followings data you get back. A run returns bio for every row.
influencer — part of the Twitter followings data you get back. A run returns influencer for every row.

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Twitter followings: pipeline, ai agents, tweet, and tweets

Teams evaluating Twitter followings work through pipeline, ai agents, tweet, tweets. Each shapes how the data is gathered and used.

twitter account, bio, apify, and scraping twitter data

Teams evaluating Twitter followings work through twitter account, bio, apify, scraping twitter data. Each shapes how the data is gathered and used.

automation, follower and following, profile data, and workflow

Teams evaluating Twitter followings work through automation, follower and following, profile data, workflow. Each shapes how the data is gathered and used.

web data, tweepy, anti-bot, and data fields

Teams evaluating Twitter followings work through web data, tweepy, anti-bot, data fields. Each shapes how the data is gathered and used.

FAQ

Can I scrape Twitter without logging in? Yes — for public Twitter data you do not need a login or cookies. The actor runs logged out on your side, which is exactly what keeps your own account safe.

Does Twitter block scraping? Twitter blocks naive scrapers aggressively: datacenter IPs, cold sessions, and fast bursts all get flagged. A maintained Twitter scraper rotates residential proxies, paces itself under the rate limit, and retries cleanly, so it does not get blocked.

Do I need coding skills to scrape Twitter data? No. You paste your input into the actor’s form and click Start — no Python, no proxy setup, no cookie handling. Developers can still drive the same actor through the Apify API.

How much does it cost to scrape Twitter followings? You pay Apify compute plus a small per-result price; check the actor’s Pricing tab for the exact rate. The free tier covers small runs, so you can test before you commit.

Can I export Twitter followings to CSV or Excel? Yes — download as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or connect Google Sheets / Airtable directly from the actor page: https://apify.com/data-slayer/twitter-followings

**Q1: Is it legal to scrape Twitter data for research or business use? Scraping public Twitter data is generally legal; private data and personal data have rules. See the legality section above, and get legal advice for commercial use.

Are Twitter followers fake? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

Are Twitter followers worth anything? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

Are there any benefits to hiding your followers list from others when they visit your profile page on Twitter? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

But the question of the hour is: how to scrape data from Twitter? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

But what if you want to use no-code tools and don’t spend thousands of dollars buying Twitter’s API? Open data-slayer/twitter-followings, paste your input, and click Start; developers can also call the same actor through the Apify API.

Can I hide my Twitter followers? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

Can I scrape protected/private tweets? No. This actor reads public Twitter followings only — it will not touch private profiles or anything behind a login.

Can I scrape tweets without the X API? Open data-slayer/twitter-followings, paste your input, and click Start; developers can also call the same actor through the Apify API.

Can I view another user’s Twitter follower statistics over time? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

Comparison: Which Tweet Scraper Should You Use? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

Curious to understand how to scrape data from Twitter? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

Does Twitter add people to my Following list? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

Extract your followings and then create your own Twitter list? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

How can I access historical tweets for certain keywords for research purposes? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

How can I copy all the people I follow on Twitter to a list? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

How can I copy/save a list of the more than 1600 Twitter accounts I follow? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

How can I determine the number of Twitter followers for an account on a certain date? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

How can I download Twitter followers list of a specific user account? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

How can I export my Twitter followers into a CSV or Excel file? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

How can I generate a list of all Twitter users by the number of followers (most followed person on top and least followed on bottom)? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

How can I generate a list of who the people that I follow on Twitter follow? Short answer: run Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on your Twitter followings input — it returns clean rows without a login. Full detail is above.

Who this is for

If you are a social media manager, this replaces the manual Twitter followings pull. Run it on a schedule, push the output to Sheets or Airtable, and your report refreshes itself.

Try it now

Ready to run it yourself? Open Twitter/X Following Scraper · Public Profiles on Apify →

No login, no code. Free tier included.