X-Knife

A command-line tool for Twitter/X API v2 that focuses on bot detection and user analysis. X-Knife helps you analyze Twitter accounts and detect potentially automated behavior through various metrics and algorithms.

• User Information Retrieval: Get detailed information about any Twitter user including account creation date, verification status, follower counts, and more
• Follower Analysis: Analyze recent followers of any account
• Bot Detection Scoring: Advanced scoring algorithm that evaluates accounts based on:
  • Verification status and account protection
  • Follower-to-following ratios with mathematical scoring
  • Account age vs. following velocity (detects rapid following behavior)
  • Additional metrics for comprehensive bot detection

• Go 1.23.2 or later
• Twitter API v2 Bearer Token (OAuth 2.0)

git clone <repository-url>
cd xknife/src/go/xknife
go build -o xknife

The project is configured for Goreleaser builds. Binary releases will include version information.

Set up your Twitter API credentials by copying the sample environment file:

cp src/go/.env.sample .env

Then edit the .env file with your credentials:

export GOTWI_API_KEY=your-api-key
export GOTWI_API_KEY_SECRET=your-api-key-secret
export GOTWI_ACCESS_TOKEN=your-oauth-access-token
export GOTWI_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=your-oauth-access-token-secret

X-Knife supports configuration via a YAML file located at $HOME/.xknife.yaml. You can also specify a custom config file using the --config flag.

Get information about a specific user:

xknife get --user username

Get recent followers for a user:

xknife followers --user username --size 50

• --user, -u: Specify the Twitter username (default: "mkoertg")
• --id: Specify the Twitter user ID directly
• --size, -s: Number of items to retrieve (default: 20)
• --config, -c: Path to config file (default: $HOME/.xknife.yaml)

Analyze a user's account:

xknife get --user elonmusk

Check recent followers with custom page size:

xknife followers --user someuser --size 100

The bot detection scoring system evaluates accounts on a 0-100% scale:

1. Verified & Protected Accounts: Automatically receive 100% (human) score
2. Follower/Following Ratio: Uses arctangent function to score based on followers vs. following
3. Following Velocity: Analyzes daily following rate since account creation (accounts following >20 users/day average are flagged as suspicious)

The algorithm combines multiple factors to provide a comprehensive bot probability score.

• michimani/gotwi - Twitter API v2 Go library
• spf13/cobra - CLI framework
• spf13/viper - Configuration management
• carlmjohnson/versioninfo - Version information

The project structure:

src/go/xknife/
├── main.go           # Entry point with version handling
├── cmd/
│   ├── root.go       # CLI root command and configuration
│   └── bots.go       # User analysis and bot detection commands
├── go.mod            # Go module definition
└── .goreleaser.yaml  # Release configuration

• X API v2 Documentation
• gotwi Library

• Botometer X
• A Decade of Social Bot Detection
• Twibot-22
• GeoGebra Graphing Calculator (used for algorithm visualization)

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.