Academics have been told to delete
Twitter data used for research purposes, unless they sign up for API access costing $42,000 per month …
Academic researchers have long used Twitter feeds to analyze things like the spread of misinformation and hate speech, and the effects of that on the offline world.
To facilitate this, Twitter provided an API (application programming interface) called
the Decahose. This provided a bulk data feed representing a random 10% of all Twitter posts each day. Access to this was either free, or cost as little as $200 per month.
Last month, however, Twitter decided that it was going to
revoke access to all its APIs unless users paid fees ranging from $100/month to $42K/month. The first impact of this was to
break all third-party Twitter apps, like Tweetbot and Twitterific. A more serious impact was to
break emergency alerts systems.
Twitter then told universities and colleges that they would lose access to the Decahose unless they paid, which would require an “enterprise level” API subscription, at $42K/month. This is
completely unaffordable for researchers.
