In an attempt to study Benfords law, I’m trying to get a list of the likes on recommendet Instagram Reels. So the plan is simply to open Reels, fetch the Like Count, swipe to the next Reel and repeat until I have enough data.

I’m trying to do this in Python with the Selenium Webdriver:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
import pyautogui
import time

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.instagram.com/")  # open instagram
time.sleep(2)
driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//button[text()="Allow all cookies"]').click()  # allow cookies
time.sleep(3)
user_field = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "username")  # enter username
user_field.send_keys("my_username")
user_field.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)
password_field = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "password")  # enter password
password_field.send_keys("my_password")
password_field.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)
time.sleep(5)
driver.get('https://www.instagram.com/reels')  # go to reels
for i in range(1, 5):  # swipe 5 reels then just wait
    time.sleep(5)
    # get how many likes the reel has (this doesn't seem to update)
    div_element = driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.html-div.xe8uvvx.xdj266r.x11i5rnm.x1mh8g0r.xexx8yu.x4uap5.x18d9i69.xkhd6sd.x6s0dn4.x1ypdohk.x78zum5.xdt5ytf.xieb3on')
    # get likes by xpath (doesn't work crashes program)
    # div_element = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="mount_0_0_vZ"]/div/div/div[2]/div/div/div[1]/div[1]/div[2]/section/main/div[2]/div[9]/div/div[2]/div[1]/div/div/div/span/span')
    # get all the buttons (works but there is alot of other unnecessay data)
    # div_element = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//div[@role="button"]')
    like_text = div_element.text
    print(like_text)  # print out the likes
    time.sleep(3)
    pyautogui.press('down')  # swipe to next reel

time.sleep(5000)

In the code I’m trying to access the highlighted span element in the picture:

This span block seems to be identical for all other reels with the exception of the like count.

But if I run the code it fails to update the like count, so it outputs:

165K
165K
165K
165K

I’ve tried to acess this element by all sorts of methods (XPATH, CSS_SELECTOR, NAME, ID,…) some of them crash others return nothing. Any ideas what to do?