Facebook recently granted access to political ad data through
its platform to academic researchers, and Twitter just made a similar announcement.
The social media company said that it will be giving free access to its Tweets
archive to researchers. Twitter’s product managers said that the company has worked
on improving its tools in the past year and is also trying to offer some help
to researchers and developers.
Although Twitter has never before done much for the researcher community, researchers have still found the platform a source of important data. Previously, Twitter’s data availability was limited to third-party researchers, and they were required to pay for premium or enterprise developer access, but the company is changing its policy now. This means that researchers will have free access to Twitter’s complete history of public conversations, Tweets, and comments, including the ones that are archived.
Twitter added that academic researchers and developers can
apply on its website to get access to the data. Moreover, access to archived data
will only be provided to independent researchers, journalists, and students enrolled
in an academic institution. Data of accounts that are inactive, banned, or
deleted will not be provided, according to the company.
Twitter has also worked on improving the accuracy of
filtering on its platform, so as to help make the research process easier and
more precise for researchers.
