  Modern social networks have become sources for vast quantities of data.
Having access to such big data can be very useful for various researchers and
data scientists. In this paper we describe Loklak, an open source distributed
peer to peer crawler and scraper for supporting such research on platforms like
Twitter, Weibo and other social networks. Social networks such as Twitter and
Weibo pose various limitations to the user on the rate at which one could
freely collect such data for research. Our crawler enables researchers to
continuously collect data while overcoming the barriers of authentication and
rate limits imposed to provide a repository of open data as a service.

Information Retrieval