Twitter for Academic Research
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Extend Historical Data For Academics
Academics should receive increased access (beyond seven days) to historical data. The seven-day limitation severely limits academic inquiry and is a primary driver behind extravagant costs for those using Twitter data in their research.
111 votes -
Raise Rate Limits For Academics
Academics should not be burdened with the same rate limits as those who access the APIs for commercial means. Lifting these rate limits would significantly increase the rate at which data could be gathered, creating cost and time efficiencies for those using Twitter data in their research.
69 votes -
Add an API to retrieve Tweet threads
I request the Twitter to allow access to all the replies of a tweet (all the conversations of a thread). It would be very useful for academics working in user behavior analysis, argumentation mining, hate speech detection because comment or reply reflects the actual thought process of a replying user.
37 votes -
Informed Consent API
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…
35 votes -
Predefined datasets
I'd like access to predefined datasets that provide ideas for my research and make it easy to get started.
18 votes -
New endpoint for detecting whether tweets are still live
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…
16 votes -
Nominate non-profit intermediaries for Firehose and other complete data APIs
Take part in Social Science One (https://socialscience.one/ ) and/or work with other non-profit intermediaries such as academic libraries and data providers (for example GESIS in Germany) for Firehose access or access to the complete follow network or other large scale data. They have the most experience when it comes to researchers' needs and can act as a trustworthy partner when it comes to protecting user privacy and the like.
17 votes -
Twitter Trends API
Many common research use-cases would be greatly facilitated by an API that could return summary level information. For instance, for any subset of tweets based on a particular query term(s) and period:
hourly/daily/weekly counts of matching tweets
histogram data of top hashtags / handles referenced / links shared
proportion of retweets / replies / first posts
proportion of dataset generated by top n contributors
These would be very valuable from a purely research perspective, but presumably they present considerable challenges for implementation. But a methodology similar to Google Trends might be possible.
9 votes -
Retrieve random tweet from the index (new API call)
Deploy a new API call to retrieve a random tweet from the index. Would be an important asset for characterization studies.
7 votes -
We need an API to validate our bot/troll detection techniques.
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…
5 votes -
Advertisement API
Access data about ads, reach, accounts promoted by, engagements.
5 votes -
Bring back the Streaming APIs
Streaming was a VERY good+easy way to get low key sampling data, without digging into heavy duty "last x million tweets" data dumps. A couple of lines of code (ie minimum wasted researcher time) and you could start collecting/analysing data.
It is very much missed.
Not to mention, of course, the damage removing streaming has done to the general Twitter ecosystem: http://apps-of-a-feather.com/
3 votes -
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliante stream
Doing research in europe is becoming harder, and GDPR add some difficult on exploiting data. I would like to know if data that we can get with the Stream API can be Anonymized.
4 votes -
Consider Different Automated Account Regulation for Academics Running Studies with Bost
Bot-based research is an important frontier in several different academic fields, but post requests are often censored or accounts associated with such posts are often suspended-- even if they do not seem to violate Twitter's automated account policies. Perhaps there could be a mechanism where academics could petition twitter not to censor bots that are being used for academic research (assuming, very importantly, that they have been carefully vetted by IRB and/or ethics officers within Twitter)?
4 votes -
Extract data without writing code
I'd like to directly access Twitter data without needing to write code to collect data from the API.
4 votes
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