If I have a set of tweet IDs, I do not believe there is a natural way of collecting quote tweets of those tweets using the Twitter API v1 or v2. This limits the ability of me and other researchers to fully study things like political dialogue, polarization, and interactions with political elites.

I believe it may be possible to retrieve quote tweets by searching tweet text for mentions of the tweet IDs, since quote retweets technically contain a URL pointing back to the quoted tweet. However, I do not think that is obvious to many API users, even if that is a viable solution.

Instead I think it would benefit many researchers if there was a query parameter or endpoint that can be used to return all the quote retweets of a given input list of tweet IDs. This may also be a natural way of extending the new conversation_id field in the v2 API since quote tweets can function like replies as additions to the conversation.

It is often useful to know when an account gains new followers or followers new accounts. If a researcher queries a user, Twitter returns the number of followers or friends at the time of the query. That makes sense. If, however, I query a tweet, such as by asking for a user's 3200 most recent tweets, each of those tweets will show me the number of followers , friends, or tweets at the time of my query, not the time of the tweet authorship. The only way to get the true number of followers, friends, or statuses when a tweet is authored is to download that tweet in real time via the stream. I would like Twitter to return those values if I download a tweet after it was authored. This issue applies to v1.1 and v2 of the API.

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

Implement an API / Bulk access call to notify users that their tweets were / are used in a study, with the option to opt-out, or opt-in to more information from the researcher. Maybe a DM with links to IRB / Home Institution / Researcher contact details?

Ideally, i'd like to notify and ask permission from people - in the past, i've implemented this as a Twitter list, adding people to give them some notification - but this doesn't give people an easy opt-out.

Given the number of times data is used, maybe an equivalent to the list of advertisers is also viable? Similar idea, API to submit User / Tweet IDs, and a section in the Settings showing a list of all the researchers that have used your data - exactly the same as the Advertisers list in "Tailored audiences" report.

I'd like access to predefined datasets that provide ideas for my research and make it easy to get started.

This falls as a more-involved way for Twitter as a cooperation to support academic research on its platform (rather than just extending API limits for .edu emails etc..) but one avenue for very supportive, engaged involvement would be curation and publication of topics.

That is to say, imagine Twitter itself publishes corpora of tweet IDs corresponding to major events like natural disasters, political events, etc... This creates a streamlined way for those studying the social dynamics surrounding major events to implement real-time study of ongoing events, and broaden the scope of existing analyses.

Currently, the study of past events relies on hydrating tweet IDs from previous major events all compiled by data-horders and college librarians and archivists. And because of the non-trivial steps involved in accessing the data, to my knowledge there are only about 15-20 examples of 'high quality' datasets which would be suitable for use in any major, longitudinal study. Twitter leading the way in publishing these events would serve not only as a long-term marker in history, but as a reference for researchers the world over.

There are certainly individuals out there who would rather compile their own topics-- this is a rich research area in itself-- however there are many disciplines where the current barrier to entry for studying the twitter discourse around an event is prohibitively high. A Twitter-curated list of Tweet IDs surrounding an event (perhaps compiled based on keywords, location, and networks properties?) could be shared as a de-facto resource in the Online Social Network field.

It would represent a significant effort on Twitter's part to actively maintain and curate these databases. However it would go beyond what any other social media site has ever done in terms of supporting academic research.

If you have a large collection of tweets it can be unwieldy to use the API to detect which tweets have been deleted - beyond complying with Twitter's own terms of service this is also necessary to respect a users agency over their own content. When a tweet or tweets are no longer available can also have an impact on what and how the results of academic research can be reported.

When sharing a dataset of tweet ids, you can also spend a lot of time trying to hydrate tweets that have mostly been deleted.

It would significantly simplify this process if there was an endpoint that given a list of tweet ids, would return a list of either which tweets are still live, or which tweets have been deleted, without returning any of the actual content.

With a higher rate limit (since it doesn't need to return actual content), keeping a collection aligned with what is still publicly available would be significantly simpler.

What I would like is the ability to use an API to alert Twitter to the presence of malicious actors interfering in elections. Ideally, it would be process whereby we crowd source and gamify the detection pieces, with Twitter's decision to suspend (or not) as the ultimate validation determining who is best at the game.

Recently, I sent 500 Canadian election Twitter IDs our model saw as bots/automated to a third party scholar: Kurt Wirth <kurtawirth@gmail.com>. I asked him if I could share his response to what I sent, he said yes. His response is below:

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Kurt Wirth <kurtawirth@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: Bots
To: Shulman, Stu <stu@texifter.com>

Hi Stu!

Here are the results for the first set. In this set, 28.7% of the accounts are estimated to be completely automated (as shown in cap.universal) and 66.4% are estimated to be at least partially automated (as shown in scores.universal). This number is very high. In other research, I've found approximately 6-6.5% of all accounts are bots and in political discussions the number drops to around 3%. I will get your second set started now.