Open-Source Social Media Scrapers: What Still Works in September 2026

As of September 2, 2026, the free scraping stack for social media is smaller than it was a year ago: Nitter and XCancel went offline on August 25 after a cease-and-desist letter from X Corp, snscrape has not been updated since November 2023, the Academic Torrents archive of Reddit history is being taken down at Reddit's request, and Reddit is winding down its public Data API in favor of a JavaScript-only Developer Platform. What still works: twscrape and Twikit for X (with your own accounts), Arctic Shift for bulk Reddit history, Instaloader for public Instagram profiles, and TikTokApi with a headless browser and proxies.

This page is a dated status table, one per platform, with each tool's last release, what it needs to run, and what broke the tools that no longer work. The date in the title is the date every row was last verified against the project's repository or the platform's own notice. We refresh it when something changes.

Disclosure: we build xpoz, a licensed social data platform that appears in the paid-routes section near the end. The open-source tools are listed on their own merits, with facts taken from their repositories and maintainers' notices at publication time.

Twitter/X Scrapers: Status in September 2026

The Nitter shutdown is the event that changed this table. On August 24, 2026, X Corp sent the project a cease-and-desist letter demanding a permanent takedown of every Nitter instance and the code repository by 5 p.m. Eastern the next day, citing the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act. nitter.net went offline, the GitHub repository was archived, and the maintainer, known as zedeus, said only that they were seeking legal advice. Every service built on Nitter, including XCancel and the RSS bridges many researchers used for logged-out timeline reads, lost its source at the same time.

snscrape never formally died, which is why it still appears in tutorials. The repository is not archived and lists Twitter users, hashtags, searches and threads as supported, but the last commit is from November 2023 and the Twitter modules depend on public endpoints that X removed when it put search behind a login wall in mid-2023. For X it is a historical artifact; its Reddit, Mastodon and other modules are a separate question.

The two libraries that work, twscrape and Twikit, work because they log in as a user. twscrape (v0.20.1 released August 25, 2026) manages a pool of X accounts, each supplying auth_token and ct0 cookies, and switches accounts when one hits a rate limit; its own README notes that X's terms discourage multiple accounts. Twikit needs a single login and reaches more of the internal API, but its last release is from February 2025 and its last commit from March 2026, with 160 open issues, which matches the "works until the next UI change" pattern users report.

The official X API is the only route with no account-ban risk, and since February 2026 it is pay-per-use only: $0.005 per post read, $0.010 per user read, $0.015 to create a post, capped at 3 million post reads per monthly billing cycle before an Enterprise contract is required. Pay-per-use covers recent search only; full-archive search back to 2006 stays behind Enterprise pricing, which third-party estimates put above $42,000 a month.

Reddit: The Public API Is Being Wound Down

Reddit's August 5, 2026 announcement in r/redditdev is the reason every Reddit row now carries a date. Reddit will "gradually start restricting all new requests" to the public Data API and wants third-party apps on its Developer Platform, which runs JavaScript and TypeScript inside Reddit; the post states that "Python support is not currently on our roadmap." Every existing API app must register by September 30, 2026; a $1 million migration program pays selected apps that move by December 31; there is no shutdown date, and existing approved OAuth credentials keep working for now. Unauthenticated .json calls, the oldest scraping shortcut, have returned 403 since late May 2026.

The bulk-history picture changed in the same month. On July 30, 2026, u/Watchful1, who published the monthly Reddit dumps on Academic Torrents that most Pushshift replacements pointed to, announced they were taking the archive down at Reddit's request. The r/DataHoarder thread on the takedown (1,490 upvotes) puts the full 2005-2025 torrent at about 3.5 TB compressed and names Hugging Face mirrors covering data through the end of 2024 and a separate set for 2025.

Arctic Shift is the maintained successor for bulk work: monthly dumps (the July 2026 dump shipped August 9), an API, and a web tool that downloads one subreddit or one user at a time. Its limit is scope: full-text search runs per subreddit or per user, not across all of Reddit, and every query on the dumps is a batch job you run yourself. PullPush, the drop-in Pushshift-compatible API, answered with HTTP 502 on July 29, 2026, throttled automated queries in August, and is missing the most recent one to two months of posts in the coverage checks developers post to r/redditdev.

Instagram: Two Working Libraries, Two Risk Levels

The Instagram split is the cleanest of the four platforms. Instaloader stays logged out, reads only what a public profile shows, and is the most maintained option (v4.15.3 released July 26, 2026). instagrapi logs in and reaches far more, including stories and direct messages, at the price of putting the account you log in with at risk; its own project notes say Meta restricted the previous support group. Neither offers keyword search across Instagram, which is the one thing most monitoring jobs need.

TikTok: One Library, One Gated Official API

TikTokApi is the only actively maintained open-source route and it is effectively a browser-automation kit: it installs Playwright, wants an ms_token from a real session, and its README tells you that empty responses mean TikTok has flagged you and you probably need proxies. It cannot post or use authenticated routes. The official Research API is free but academics-only, and for commercial or operational use the realistic options are third-party APIs and actor marketplaces (see the next section).

What Replaced the Free Stack

When a free tool dies, its users split into three groups: those who move to another free tool from the tables above, those who pay a per-call data API, and those who move the whole job onto a licensed platform. The paid routes differ mainly in what they index and how you access it.

Xpoz is our platform, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. It indexes billions of public posts across X, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok, searchable by keyword across posts and comments, with tracked keywords and accounts for continuous monitoring. The free tier is a one-time allocation covering up to 75,000 results with no credit card; Pro at $20 a month covers up to 1,000,000 results a month. Access is through a remote MCP server (so Claude, ChatGPT or any agent framework can query it in natural language), a REST API, SDKs and a CLI, which is the part the open-source tools above never offered.

How to Choose in September 2026

You need X data and have a few accounts to spare: twscrape, with the understanding that accounts get rate-limited and sometimes banned. For anything customer-facing, the official pay-per-use API or a licensed platform.

You need historical Reddit in bulk (training data, corpus statistics): Arctic Shift dumps, plus the Hugging Face mirrors of the older Academic Torrents sets while they last. For searchable, current Reddit data, a licensed index; the public API is closing to new apps.

You need public Instagram profiles or media: Instaloader. For keyword search across Instagram, no open-source tool does it; that is data-platform territory.

You need TikTok at any real volume: TikTokApi plus proxies for experiments, a third-party API or platform for production, the Research API if you qualify.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is snscrape still working in 2026?

Not for X. The repository is alive but its last commit is from November 2023, and the Twitter modules rely on public endpoints X removed in 2023. Its non-Twitter modules are a separate question. For X, the maintained open-source options are twscrape and Twikit, both of which require your own accounts.

Is Nitter coming back?

There is no sign of it. X Corp's cease-and-desist of August 24, 2026 demanded a permanent takedown of all instances and the repository, nitter.net states that development has stopped, and the GitHub repository is archived. Self-hosted instances face the same legal demand.

What replaced Pushshift for Reddit data?

For bulk history, Arctic Shift (monthly dumps, API, web download tool). For a Pushshift-compatible API, PullPush, with the caveats above: outages and a gap covering the most recent one to two months. The Academic Torrents dumps that filled the gap since 2023 are being taken down at Reddit's request as of July 30, 2026, with partial mirrors on Hugging Face.

Can I still use PRAW after September 30, 2026?

Existing approved OAuth apps keep working; Reddit has set no shutdown date and said the transition would not complete this year. What changes is new access: Reddit is restricting new requests to the public Data API and steering developers to the JavaScript-only Developer Platform, so a new Python project should not count on getting credentials. Register any existing app before September 30, 2026.

Which open-source scrapers work without an account?

Instaloader (public Instagram profiles) and Arctic Shift (Reddit dumps and API) run logged out. TikTokApi runs logged out but needs a browser session token and usually proxies. Every working X scraper now needs at least one authenticated account.

Related Reading

• How to Get Twitter Data Without the Official API
• Best Twitter API Alternatives in 2026
• How to Get Historical Reddit Data After Pushshift
• Reddit API Pricing, Tiers and Alternatives
• Best Instagram API Alternatives After the Meta Changes
• TikTok Research API: Limits, Access, and Alternatives
• Best Social Media Scraping APIs Compared