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Twitter on Tuesday announced a significant change in the type of data it makes available for free to third-party academic researchers interested in studying user behaviors and discourse trends online. Now Twitter says it will no longer be forced to pay researchers for premium or enterprise developer access and will instead put “full public chat history” – what the company calls its Comprehensive Archive Research Endpoint – available to any researcher or developer who applies as part of the launch of a new academic research avenue.
The change is part of the company’s ongoing efforts to improve the Twitter API, the set of tools it makes available to people outside the company to create something on Twitter or use its mountains of data. for research studies. Twitter launched its new and improved API last summer to make amends with the developer and research communities, who have often found themselves at odds with the continued and sometimes contradictory development of the platform’s products over the years. . This contentious relationship began in particular in 2012, when Twitter decided to cut off key developers’ access to the platform in order to maintain tighter control over the data it let potential competitors use.
Twitter recognizes the less than ideal relationship it has with the developer and research communities. “Our development platform hasn’t always made it easy for researchers to access the data they need, and many have had to rely on their own ingenuity to find the right information. Despite this, for more than a decade, university researchers have used Twitter data for discoveries and innovations that help make the world a better place, ”write product managers Adam Tornes and Leanne Trujillo in a blog post published today.
Tornes and Trujillo highlight steps Twitter has taken over the past year to improve its tools, including posting a free COVID-19 endpoint and a beta of the new academic research track to gather feedback appropriate prior to today’s public launch. And the company is making a concerted effort to convince researchers that it wants to help them, especially now that social media discourse has become more crucial to understanding online disinformation, election interference, hate speech and other topics. who took center stage during and after the 2020. US election.
In addition to opening its public archive, Twitter says it also gives approved applicants a monthly tweet volume cap of 10 million tweets higher, which is 20 times higher than what was available on the free track. standard before. It also allows for more precise filtering to help researchers identify tweets and other data relevant to what they are studying and “new technical and methodological guides” to help researchers find what they are looking for and better use in their studies.
Twitter says interested academics and developers can apply to the company’s new academic research lead developer’s website. The track will have some limitations, however. For the moment, the company now opens access to independent researchers or journalists. You must be a student or be part of an academic institution. Twitter also says it will not provide access to data from accounts that have been suspended or banned, which could complicate efforts to investigate hate speech, disinformation and other types of conversations that break Twitter rules.
It also means that the @realDonaldTrump account is also not accessible via Twitter’s archives following the widespread deployment of Trump by US social media sites following the deadly attack on the US Capitol. Still, Trump’s tweets are archived online through his official presidential library, while independent websites and database tools such as The Trump Twitter Archive and ProPublicaPolitwoops also kept the former president’s tweets, including those deleted.
“We’ve heard a lot of interest from the academic research community to study @realDonaldTrump,” Trujillo said on a call with reporters Monday. “We are discussing internally how we might think seriously about studying this topic.”
Updated Jan. 26, 3:47 p.m. ET: Added more information on accessing suspended or banned accounts and former President Donald Trump’s tweets.
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