Location Data
A lot of researchers in the health field utilize location data to understand trends within a defined area. This is important when studying twitter data in relation to epidemics. However, it seems currently it's not possible to access geo-location data thus hindering this process.
Kindly add geo-location data to the Twitter API
Sajjad Fazel
shared this idea
3 comments
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Jean Burgess
commented
Adding geo data beyond what users have opted into will only amplify privacy concerns. I get that it's desirable for some disciplines, but it is a bad idea from an ethics perspective.
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Dan
commented
I do like this idea, but is already implemented on twitter. The problem is that is not a default, which is a good thing tbh. I wonder if its possible to have amore brad geolocation based on conection information. For us researcher, even a broad, wide radious geolocation is better than nothing.
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Can you say more about why you believe geo information is not available at present?
Geo data is already available in the Twitter API. However, it is (intentionally) left to the user to decide when they choose to add location information to a Tweet, and historically the numbers of Tweets with location attached tends to be fairly low. Correspondingly, data sets that search based on location may not always return a very high number of matching Tweets.
