Twitter for Academic Research
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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…
44 votes -
Predefined datasets
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…
24 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.
19 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…
7 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.
10 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.
8 votes -
Advertisement API
Access data about ads, reach, accounts promoted by, engagements.
6 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)?
7 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.
5 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.
5 votes
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