Twitter Opening Its Tweet Archive to Researchers

Well this seems like good news. One of the biggest annoyances of trying to do research on Twitter, IMHO, is the difficulty in obtaining older tweets. There are workarounds, such as using a previously-captured dataset from Documenting the Now, or collecting via snscrape, but it seems there is now better official access for researchers via Twitter’s API version 2.

According to the c|net article, Twitter wants to make it easier for researchers to analyze tweets,

Researchers will have to submit an application to Twitter to receive access to this trove of data. To be eligible, applicants have to be a “master’s student, doctoral candidate, post-doc, faculty, or research-focused employee at an academic institution or university.” They also have to a “clearly defined research objective,” and the research must be used for “non-commercial purposes.”

And MakeUseOf’s report, Twitter Opens Up Its Tweet Archive to Researchers highlights,

Twitter plans for its new API to eventually fully replace its current standard, premium, and enterprise APIs. In the meantime, in order to get feedback from researchers, the company has launched early access for Twitter API v2.

I’ve had a couple of ideas rolling around for a while now, so have submitted an application. I’ll let you know how it goes!