Botometer Python API

A Python API for Botometer by OSoMe.

Behind the scenes, this uses the Botometer's HTTP endpoint, available via Mashape Market.

Help

You probably want to have a look at Troubleshooting & FAQ in the wiki. Please feel free to suggest and/or contribute improvements to that page.

Quickstart

From your command shell, run

pip install botometer

then in a Python shell or script, enter something like this:

import botometer

mashape_key = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
twitter_app_auth = {
    'consumer_key': 'xxxxxxxx',
    'consumer_secret': 'xxxxxxxxxx',
    'access_token': 'xxxxxxxxx',
    'access_token_secret': 'xxxxxxxxxxx',
  }
bom = botometer.Botometer(wait_on_ratelimit=True,
                          mashape_key=mashape_key,
                          **twitter_app_auth)

# Check a single account
result = bom.check_account('@clayadavis')

# Check a sequence of accounts
accounts = ['@clayadavis', '@onurvarol', '@jabawack']
for screen_name, result in bom.check_accounts_in(accounts):
    # Do stuff

Result:

{
  "categories": {
    "content": 0.18,
    "friend": 0.25,
    "network": 0.13,
    "sentiment": 0.19,
    "temporal": 0.31,
    "user": 0.44
  },
  "scores": {
    "english": 0.2,
    "universal": 0.25
  },
  "user": {
    "id_str": "1548959833",
    "screen_name": "clayadavis"
  }
}

Install instructions

This package is on PyPI so you can install it with pip:

$ pip install botometer

Dependencies

Python dependencies

• requests
• tweepy

Both of these dependencies are available via pip, so you can install both at once with

pip install requests tweepy

Mashape Market API key

Our API is served via Mashape Market. You must sign up for a free account in order to obtain a Mashape secret key. The easiest way to get your secret key is to visit our API endpoint page and look in the "Request Example" as shown below:

Twitter app

In order to access Twitter's API, one needs to have/create a Twitter app. Once you've created an app, the authentication info can be found in the "Keys and Access Tokens" tab of the app's properties:

References

• Varol, Onur, Emilio Ferrara, Clayton A. Davis, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini. "Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization." ICWSM (2017). AAAI, ArXiv

• Davis, C. A., Varol, O., Ferrara, E., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2016, April). BotOrNot: A system to evaluate social bots. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (pp. 273-274). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. ArXiv, ACM Library

• Ferrara, Emilio, Onur Varol, Clayton Davis, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini. "The rise of social bots." Communications of the ACM 59, no. 7 (2016): 96-104. ArXiv, ACM Library