Allow API access to tweets from suspended accounts
For research focused on still-existing troll farms, it's critical to have access to tweets of accounts Twitter already suspended.
As troll farms:
1) are highly skillful in pushing legit users to breaking Twitter rules (and therefore to become suspended)
2) frequently experience suspension of their own accounts
3) when creating new accounts, tend to refer to their previous accounts to easier regain followership
Currently, conversations with heavy involvement of troll farm accounts look like this:
https://twitter.com/pj1m6y2z1fmwdn7/status/1151811700557045761
This Tweet is from a suspended account. Learn more
This Tweet is from a suspended account. Learn more
(single live tweet)
This Tweet is from a suspended account. Learn more
This Tweet is from a suspended account. Learn more
This Tweet is from a suspended account. Learn more
antibot4navalny
shared this idea
3 comments
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Joseph Flanagan
commented
What’s even worse, a strict reading of Twitter’s terms of service would mean that we can’t do any research on tweets from suspended accounts, since we are expected to destroy tweets that have been removed from Twitter. I don’t think academics (or Twitter) realize the implications of this policy.
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Robert Clayton
commented
Given the recent suspension of prominent political figures, this is now more important than ever. Twitter is a powerful, mainstream app that prominent public figures use for communication. Furthermore, researchers now rely on Twitter data across several disciplines.
How can cultural sociologists, for example, accurately study the Trump Era without access to his tweets, given how heavily he used the platform for messaging?
Given the recent slew of suspensions, It is critical that Twitter devise a method for allowing researchers to access this data.
Please and thank you, Twitter 🙂
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Thank you for the suggestion! While it might not fully meet your desired outcome, we have been releasing many datasets of this type over the last 18 months or so. You can find these datasets here: https://transparency.twitter.com/en/information-operations.html (by providing your email address at the bottom).
