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Chris Greening
Chris Greening

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Scraping 25,000 data points from Joe Biden's Instagram using instascrape

In this post, I'm going to discuss how I used my open source Instagram scraper to scrape 25,000 data points from Joe Biden's Instagram page.

Combining selenium and instascrape, I wrote a quick script that automatically scrolled Joe Biden's Instagram page and scraped the first 500 posts, yielding us almost 25,000 data points to explore (with 49 data points per post) πŸ™Œ.

Let's see what his likes per post looks like with a little matplotlib and scikit-learn magic 😏

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As expected, we can see steady growth and then a massive spike upwards as election day approached.

Let's take a look at comments per post now for the heck of it:

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There's a ton of different things we can do now that the data is available to us and it's really up to you what you do with it. Using the to_dict instance method, I can build a pandas.DataFrame from all of our data for easy analysis in a clean, expressive format. With a script like the following, we can get every post where Joe Biden used a hashtag.

dataframe[dataframe.hashtags.str.len() != 0]
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or say we wanted every post where Joe got more than 1,000,000 likes:

dataframe[dataframe["likes"] > 1000000]
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...so what are you waiting for? Get out there and start exploring Instagram data programatically!

If you're interested in reading more about instascrape, check out some of my other posts:

or better yet, come to the official repo and drop it a star and contribute ❀️

GitHub logo chris-greening / instascrape

Powerful and flexible Instagram scraping library for Python, providing easy-to-use and expressive tools for accessing data programmatically

instascrape: powerful Instagram data scraping toolkit

DISCLAIMER:

Instagram has gotten increasingly strict with scraping and using this library can result in getting flagged for botting AND POSSIBLE DISABLING OF YOUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT. This is a research project and I am not responsible for how you use it. Independently, the library is designed to be responsible and respectful and it is up to you to decide what you do with it. I don't claim any responsibility if your Instagram account is affected by how you use this library.

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What is it?

instascrape is a lightweight Python package that provides an expressive and flexible API for scraping Instagram data. It is geared towards being a high-level building block on the data scientist's toolchain and can be seamlessly integrated and extended with industry standard tools for web scraping, data science, and analysis.

Key features

Here are a few of the things that…

Top comments (2)

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shaikh profile image
Javed Shaikh

This is amazing.thanks for sharing πŸ™‚

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chrisgreening profile image
Chris Greening

Thanks so much Javed!! Glad you appreciated it <3