Twitter improves API usage for researchers

We&#x27;ve been running our startup [1] in this &quot;media research industry&quot; for just a while. We&#x27;re on the classic media use case side.<p>It is true that the vast majority of &quot;research&quot; is done by non-academics. Lots of companies doing market research want to mine media data.<p>Still, I believe that this &quot;social media research&quot; is a bit overvalued. There was this wave of &quot;social media is the primary source where information appear&quot;. But now many realized how freaking difficult to separate this data from the noise comparing to traditional news published by journalists.<p>Also, take a look on this article [2] about how Dataminr sells insights from Twitter data to foreign governments (2017). Seems like just a way to punish the opposition channels.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newscatcherapi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newscatcherapi.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;1&#x2F;27&#x2F;14412014&#x2F;dataminr-twitter-firehose-foreign-pitch-canada-azerbaijan-surveillance-pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;1&#x2F;27&#x2F;14412014&#x2F;dataminr-twitter...</a>

It&#x27;s a shame access to this API is limited to academic institutions, as many social media&#x2F;misinformation researchers are now independent or affiliated with journalistic institutions.

In what research contexts is API usage valid instead of scraping a view more similar to what people experience? If the Twitter site and API are retrospectively cleared of removed&#x2F;suspended accounts with large impact, how does that affect retrospective studies?<p>Are there ethical implications of working with Twitter to gather data? Despite Twitter TOS, legal, IRB ok, are there informed consent issues in studying the artifacts of social media use?

I wonder how are they going to enforce their rules, e.g. non-commercial use. I assume this will require some monitoring to be effective. Large scale Twitter API access is typically pricey, malicious actors might try to buy or steal researcher&#x27;s credentials to cut costs.

&gt; You are either a master’s student, doctoral candidate, post-doc, faculty, or research-focused employee at an academic institution or university.<p>This is gross. Rather than using the internet as a democratizing force for education, they restrict the program to those already inside credential-granting institutions. So much great research has been done from outside the institution and yet Twitter is actively pushing outsiders to resort to scraping.

Is it me or is Twitter making a lot of announcements this month?

But not for suspended accounts<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-twitter-product&#x2F;twitter-grants-academics-full-access-to-public-data-but-not-for-suspended-accounts-idINKBN29V2B1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-twitter-product&#x2F;twitter-g...</a>

Twitter makes it easier for Researchers to use tweets and the Twitter API for research.

basing on those UI screens, then why research is always associated with academia?<p>there&#x27;s a lot of strong people especially in CS who do not work with academia and still work on interesting stuff

I always wondered: how many of these tweets are just Justin Bieber fandom type posts, bots, spam, or other dross? Twitter is infamous for its bad signal to noise ratio. These researchers need to write algos to filter out all the noise

Is it better then the previous time that they changed it?

Researchers like Joan Donovan?

Could have saved you some work, the research results are that Twitter is very liberal, less conservative and nobody has seen a libertarian for days.