Twitter opens up its APIs to academic researchers

Twitter has introduced a new facility for academic researchers, allowing them to tap its APIs (application-programming interfaces) for approved research purposed. The move will provide approved researchers with “unparalleled access” to Twitter’s public conversational data across all subjects.

Twitter’s standard API is publicly available to all approved researchers and free-of-charge to use, while its premium API, available on a month-to-month subscription basis, enables researchers to access the entire public history of tweets via Boolean queries.

The new portal also provides researchers with additional tools for data analysis and data visualization, plus infrastructure and hosting solutions.

On the homepage of the new portal for academics, Twitter writes: “If it exists, it’s probably been talked about on Twitter. Be it the humanities, social and political sciences, psychology, data or computer sciences. Twitter data is a powerful resource for all academic disciplines with topics as diverse as the conversations happening on our service right now.

“We believe that making our data available to the academic research community will improve our service and increase learning around the world. At Twitter, we value the contributions of academic researchers and see the potential for them to help us better understand our platform, keeping us accountable, while helping us tackle new challenges through discoveries and innovations.

“Twitter is constantly exploring ways to uncover more knowledge and insights from our platform; our goal is to push the boundaries of what's possible and share cutting edge research with the academic community to help inspire and enable your research. We’re always looking to improve our platform for academic researchers and are happy to receive suggestions from our users.”

Academic researchers can apply for an account here.

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