R: r tweets: Error: can only select one search type. Try type = 'recent'

Question

I am using 'rtweet' package to collect tweets by location.

  rt <- search_tweets(
      "lang:en",  lookup_coords("san francisco, CA", "country:US"), n = 10000

I get the following error when I mention city, state and country.

Error: can only select one search type. Try type = 'recent'

Answer 1

The documentation for rtweet::search_tweets tells that you need to specify which type of tweet you are looking for. There are three options to choose from: "recent", "popular", "mixed". You need to specify them in your call.

Here is a call to search tweets that will not throw an error (the coordinates I specified are in San Francisco, and I set a radius of 40 kilometers. I also picked a term that I am certain will return matches)

first_batch <- rtweet::search_tweets(q= "Kanye",
                                     geocode = "37.773972,-122.431297,40km", n = 100, type = "recent",
                                     retryonratelimit = TRUE, parse = TRUE)

I changed your call slightly, so it doesn't throw an error, but the search was retrieving 0 tweets (I think because the lookup_coords was returning empty)

second_batch <- rtweet::search_tweets(q= "Kanye",
                             geocode = rtweet::lookup_coords("San Francisco, CA", "country:US"), n = 100, type = "recent",
                             retryonratelimit = TRUE, parse = TRUE)

I have searched for tweets based on location before, and I advise you to use the first method. Grab latitude and longitude from Google, and set up a radius. Then pass them into the function with a search term and specifying the type parameter.