An extension for extracting and downloading Truth Social posts for text mining and analysis.

Cite this program

If you use this extension for your research, please reference it as follows:

Moncomble, F. (2025). TruthScraper (Version 0.3) [JavaScript]. Arras, France: Université d’Artois. Available at: https://fmoncomble.github.io/truthscraper/

Important notice

For research purposes only, in compliance with relevant copyright and privacy legislation and Truth Social’s Terms of Service.

Installation

Firefox

Chrome/Edge

Remember to pin the add-on to the toolbar.

Instructions for use

• Click the add-on’s icon in the toolbar.
• On first using the add-on, follow the authentication procedure to authorize the app on Mastodon. All credentials are stored locally on your computer, not on a remote server.
• Choose a search mode or user history mode.
  • In guided or expert search mode, build your search query with at least one keyword, and click Search.
  • In user history mode, type the username of the account whose posts you want to retrieve, and click Search.
• (Optional) Enter the maximum number of toots to collect.
• You can stop the process at any time by clicking Abort.
• When all posts have been collected, a dialog opens for you to select the metadata to include in the file. By default, account name, date, content and URL are included.
• Choose your preferred output format:
  • XML/XTZ for an XML file to import into TXM using the XML/TEI-Zero module
    • When initiating the import process, open the “Textual planes” section and type ref in the field labelled “Out of text to edit”
  • TXT for plain text
  • CSV
  • XLSX
  • JSON
• Click Download to save the file to the location of your choice.
• Click Reset to start afresh.

Known limitations

• Searching by language is not built into the Truth Social API, meaning that results are filtered from the whole query response, which may take some time depending on the chosen criteria.
• Truth Social’s server is sensitive to automatic activity. As a result, the user may be temporarily blocked. There is mechanism around that but if it fails you may need to wait or use a VPN.