Twitter on Tuesday announced a significant shift in the kind of data it makes available free of charge to third-party academics interested in studying user behavior and trends related to online discourse. Now, Twitter says researchers will no longer require them to pay for access to premium or enterprise developer access, and will instead make the “complete history of public conversations” – which the company refers to as its endpoint for complete archive searches – available to any researcher or developer applicable as part of the launch of a new academic research track.
The change is part of the company’s ongoing efforts to improve the Twitter API, the set of tools it makes available to those outside the company to build something on top of Twitter or use its mountains of data for research studies. Twitter launched its new and improved API last summer as a way to keep up with the developers and research communities, both of which have often been at odds with the platform’s ongoing and sometimes conflicting product development over the years. This controversial relationship began especially in 2012, when Twitter decided to end the most important developer access to the platform in order to maintain tighter control over what data potential competitors use.
Twitter acknowledges the less-ideal relationship with the developer and research communities. ‘Our developer platform has not 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, academic researchers have been using Twitter data for more than a decade 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 point to the steps Twitter has taken over the past year to improve its tools, including the release of a COVID-19 endpoint for free and a beta of the new academic research track to gather proper feedback ahead of the public launch of today. And the company is making a real effort to convince researchers that they want to help them, especially now that social media conversations have become more important in understanding misinformation, election interference, hate speech and other topics that took center stage during and after 2020. US election.
In addition to opening its public archive, Twitter says it also gives approved applicants a higher monthly tweet volume of 10 million tweets, which is 20 times higher than what was previously available on the standard free track. It also allows for more accurate filtering to help researchers determine tweets and other data relevant to what they are studying, and ‘new technical and methodological guidelines’ to help researchers find what they are looking for and to use it better in studies.
Twitter says interested academics and developers can apply for the new academic research track on the company website developer. However, the track will be restricted. For now, the company offers access to independent researchers or journalists. You must be a student or an academic institution. Twitter also says that it will not provide access to data from suspended or banned accounts, which could complicate attempts at hate speech, misinformation and other types of conversations that violate Twitter’s rules.
It also means that the account @realDonaldTrump is also not accessible via Twitter’s archive of the social distribution of American social media after Trump’s attack on the American Capitol. Trump’s tweets are still archived online by his official presidential library, while independent websites and database tools such as The Trump Twitter Archive and ProPublicaPolitwoops also kept the tweets of the former president, including the removed one.
“We have heard a lot of interest from the academic research community to study @realDonaldTrump,” Trujillo said Monday in a call with reporters. “We are conducting internal discussions on how we can thoroughly consider the study of this topic.”
Update January 26, 15:47 PM ET: More information on access to suspended or banned accounts and the tweets of former President Donald Trump added.