[Air-L] Twitter no longer allowing use for scholarship - Update

[Amanda Lenhart]

Thanks to everyone who wrote with feedback and details about their twitter-oriented research needs. I've pulled together everyone's requests and I've forwarded them to my friend at Twitter. I'll update the list when I hear anything.

Thanks,

Amanda

Amanda Lenhart
Pew Research Center
alenhart at pewinternet.org<mailto:alenhart at pewinternet.org>

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On Friday, I had a conversation at conference with someone I know who works at Twitter. We talked about this exact issue. And while Twitter can't change back the API because of other problems the change was fixing, she would very much like to give academics and non-profit researchers access to Twitter data. However, she has to push through a proposal internally to make this happen. She said it would help her make the case if I could tell her what parts of the data set researchers wanted to access.

I offered to ping the AoIR list to get a sense of what people want and need from Twitter to be able to do/continue their research.

Also, one thing my friend did mention -- because Twitter data can never be fully anonymized, there might be some limitations on what kind of analysis you could do - mostly along the lines of limits on analysis that would reveal information about the individual that they had not made explicit and which might be harmful (e.g. Using network analysis to speculate on users' sexual orientation).

So, please email me off-list and I'll compile the types of data requests and send them along to my Twitter friend.

Thanks,

Amanda


Amanda Lenhart
Pew Research Center
alenhart at pewinternet.org<mailto:alenhart at pewinternet.org>