[Air-L] Buying tweets ?

[Deen Freelon]

I have purchased tweets directly from Twitter on multiple occasions. I 
disagree with Dr. Gloviczki about paying research costs--some of the 
most rigorous research is sponsored. I wouldn't spend my own personal 
money on such costs, but if you've got funding, by all means use it.

Twitter allows university-affiliated users to buy data in a few ways. 
I've primarily used their a la carte service (that's just what I call 
it), where you give them a set of search criteria (e.g. a keyword[s] and 
a time period) and they give you a quote. Pricing is based on the number 
of days covered and the total volume of tweets. Their minimum price is a 
little over $1k US and costs can quickly run into the five-figure range, 
especially if you want tweets over a lengthy period of time. Also, they 
have been known to refuse certain data requests, especially those 
related to international conflict. The criteria for "acceptable" data 
requests are not public--I've asked.

Twitter does not advertise this service but it does exist. Fill out this 
form and ask about it: 
https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterprise/application

The associated metadata are the same as provided through the standard 
APIs. These can be found here: 
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/tweets/post-and-engage/api-reference/get-statuses-lookup 
Language tags are included, and geographic info is present only when 
users opt in, which is rare (typically 3-5% of tweets). I will also say 
that obtaining the data once purchased is not easy--they come as GZIPped 
JSON files packaged in 10-minute increments. So a year of data is far 
too much to download manually--you'd need to automate your download 
pipeline. I've written code to do this, so anyone who manages to 
successfully buy Twitter data may feel free to contact me to access my 
scripts.

Twitter also offers a couple other data purchase options, including its 
Premium API 
(https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/premium-apis) and 
its Enterprise API 
(https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterprise#/). 
These charge pretty steep monthly fees and are oriented more toward 
corporate and other well-funded clients.

Finally, here's their portal for academic researchers, which may have 
some relevant info: 
https://developer.twitter.com/en/solutions/academic-research/products-for-researchers

Best, /DEEN

On 9/10/2020 8:39 AM, Sandrine Roginsky wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> Help needed. Does anyone have experience with buying tweets from Twitter for research? We have a fairly specific query and would like to know which information is given about the tweets harvested through the query (e.g. is language or geographic information given for tweets, even if it isn't part of the query - so not a selection criterion)?
>
> Many thanks.
>
> Best wishes,
> Sandrine
>
>
>
> Sandrine Roginsky
> Associate Professor
>
> Faculty of Economic, Social and Political Sciences, and Communication
> Institute Language & Communication, PCOM / LASCO
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Deen Freelon, Ph.D.
Associate Professor -> Hussman School of Journalism and Media
Principal Researcher -> Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
http://dfreelon.org | @dfreelon <https://twitter.com/dfreelon> | 
https://github.com/dfreelon | https://citap.unc.edu/
Schedule an appointment with me 
<https://doodle.com/mm/deenfreelon/book-a-time>