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Twitter improves API usage for researchers
- jansenmac 6y agoTwitter makes it easier for Researchers to use tweets and the Twitter API for research.
- waheoo 6y agoCould have saved you some work, the research results are that Twitter is very liberal, less conservative and nobody has seen a libertarian for days.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoWhere's your sources, numbers, methodology? I mean anyone can make a kneejerk statement based on their perception (read: bubble), but that's not science.
- ceejayoz 6y agoYou should follow different people.
- wlesieutre 6y agoI'd think libertarians would love twitter, deplatforming is the free market at work and the government has no right to make them do business with anyone they choose not to
- peytn 6y agoAnd one might think liberals, putting liberty above order, would be aghast at silencing opponents to maintain order, and yet here we are. Our political theater has gotten pretty weird. The whole thing is looking more and more like unprincipled tribes vying for power.
- pjanoman 6y agoSilence is a strong word -- I'm certainly still able to hear news from Donald Trump, even if he was banned from Twitter.
- sojournerc 6y agoYou're right about Trump. Most people don't have the platform he has. Many dissenting voices have been removed from the conversation, and you wouldn't even know they are missing.
- croon 6y agoExcept I keep hearing about it constantly, everywhere, including Twitter. And yet I haven't seen a single one being banned for discussing fiscal policy, less regulation, conservative views on social programs etc. "Conservative voices [being] silenced" are almost always some variation of spamming evidently real-world damaging conspiracy theories or clear ToS violations.
- sojournerc 6y agoI didn't say conservative - I said dissenting. Although I imagine many conservatives have learned to self-censor so they can remain part of the conversation there. How about asserting that men and women are different biologically? Is that a conspiracy theory? Or is it simply a dissenting viewpoint from the group-think of Twitter that was silenced... https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/25/twitter-permanently-bans-feminist-writing-men-arent-women/ https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/25/twitter-permanently-ban...
- croon 6y ago> In late 2018, Twitter changed its policy on hateful conduct and harassment to officially prohibit intentionally calling a trans person by the wrong pronouns or using their pre-transition names.[62] Beginning in August 2018, Murphy stated that her Twitter account was locked more than once after she tweeted about issues involving trans women.[63] Twitter permanently suspended Murphy's account in late November 2018, after she referred to Jessica Yaniv, a trans woman, as "him".[64][65][66] On February 11, 2019, Murphy filed a lawsuit against Twitter in response to her banning.[67] The suit was dismissed in early June, but Murphy stated that she intended to file an appeal.[68][69] Clear ToS violation. Which proves my point. Sidenote: The Federalist itself got its account banned from twitter for spreading covid misinformation.
- 5560675260 6y agoTwitter should be judged by the way it governs its platform. And from libertarian perspective it's governed poorly. Sure, under current laws they can get away with deplatforming in the way they do now, but there is nothing commendable or desirable about it for libertarians specifically.
- jijji 6y agoyou would think from the amount of republican/conservative accounts they have banned that they have some AI or parser dedicated to banning these types of voices
- guerrilla 6y agoIs it me or is Twitter making a lot of announcements this month?
- blindm 6y agoI always wondered: how many of these tweets are just Justin Bieber fandom type posts, bots, spam, or other dross? Twitter is infamous for its bad signal to noise ratio. These researchers need to write algos to filter out all the noise
- adolph 6y agoAre there researchers out there using bot accounts to prospectively experiment with social media researchers?
- edent 6y agoWhat's wrong with that? If you wanted to investigate, say, the rise of The Beatles - wouldn't you love to have access to the random thoughts of their fans in the 1960s? Similarly, if you're researching bots and spam and how they manipulate people & markets - this is still useful.
- sigil 6y agoA lot! I ran named entity recognition on the Twitter garden hose back in 2012. The top entities were Bieber and the Jonas brothers.
- tester34 6y agobasing on those UI screens, then why research is always associated with academia? there's a lot of strong people especially in CS who do not work with academia and still work on interesting stuff
- leephillips 6y agoAbsolutely. The limitation to people associated with academic institutions is pretty old fashioned (and also, from another point of view, modern).
- adolph 6y agoMaybe it has to do with control. Student==likely low impact. Faculty==likely uncontroversial. API==looks like transparency.
- anonymousDan 6y agoBecause it's easy for Twitter to draw the line between commercial and non-commercial use?
- adolph 6y agoIn what research contexts is API usage valid instead of scraping a view more similar to what people experience? If the Twitter site and API are retrospectively cleared of removed/suspended accounts with large impact, how does that affect retrospective studies? Are there ethical implications of working with Twitter to gather data? Despite Twitter TOS, legal, IRB ok, are there informed consent issues in studying the artifacts of social media use?
- dharmab 6y agoOne easy example is language, for example tracking the spread of new words or other language constructs. You don’t care how the site looks, you care about the text that was previously input.
- fnord123 6y agoUntil now, none I think. The API only gave a partial view while scraping offered all tweets for a particular search term. The scraper had to be clever to juke the anti scraping systems but you would get a more complete data set than using the API. And the streaming API was terrible. Even if there was no data on the stream you could consume tens of gigabytes of bandwidth a day. Dreadful.
- thih9 6y agoI wonder how are they going to enforce their rules, e.g. non-commercial use. I assume this will require some monitoring to be effective. Large scale Twitter API access is typically pricey, malicious actors might try to buy or steal researcher's credentials to cut costs.
- cocktailpeanuts 6y agoI recently tried to sign up for Twitter API and the process is nothing like what it used to be. You have to give them a lot of information to even qualify, such as what you're going to use it for. It used to be that those were just some fields you need to fill out and you could sign up immediately. But nowadays the application process requires a direct approval from their team, which means they're monitoring every API account like Apple does with their app store. And if you like about your usage you are probably liable
- williesleg 6y agoTwitter is officially in the shitter.
- artembugara 6y agoWe've been running our startup [1] in this "media research industry" for just a while. We're on the classic media use case side. It is true that the vast majority of "research" is done by non-academics. Lots of companies doing market research want to mine media data. Still, I believe that this "social media research" is a bit overvalued. There was this wave of "social media is the primary source where information appear". But now many realized how freaking difficult to separate this data from the noise comparing to traditional news published by journalists. Also, take a look on this article [2] about how Dataminr sells insights from Twitter data to foreign governments (2017). Seems like just a way to punish the opposition channels. [1] https://newscatcherapi.com/ https://newscatcherapi.com/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/27/14412014/dataminr-twitter-firehose-foreign-pitch-canada-azerbaijan-surveillance-pdf https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/27/14412014/dataminr-twitter...
- minimaxir 6y agoIt's a shame access to this API is limited to academic institutions, as many social media/misinformation researchers are now independent or affiliated with journalistic institutions.
- trident5000 6y agoMisinformation and troll farms on Twitter start with unrestricted API usage to the masses.
- Nextgrid 6y agoMisinformation & troll farms appear to do just fine with the current restricted API. What evidence is there that read-only API access will make it significantly easier for them (enough to outweigh the other upsides)?
- trident5000 6y agoSo you're telling me API's are not useful while at the same time telling me that API's are useful. Trolls want API access for the same reason researchers want access. You could argue research is the first step to becoming an effective troll.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI don't see API access as being necessary for a small-scale trolling operation, and large scale operations have enough resources to work around the lack of API by scraping. I'm not saying that API access is completely useless, I was raising the question of whether the potential (and relatively small) benefit to trolling outweighs the major upsides of API access being available for all.
- beefman 6y agoBut not for suspended accounts https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-product/twitter-grants-academics-full-access-to-public-data-but-not-for-suspended-accounts-idINKBN29V2B1 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-product/twitter-g...
- Triv888 6y agoIs it better then the previous time that they changed it?
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago> You are either a master’s student, doctoral candidate, post-doc, faculty, or research-focused employee at an academic institution or university. This is gross. Rather than using the internet as a democratizing force for education, they restrict the program to those already inside credential-granting institutions. So much great research has been done from outside the institution and yet Twitter is actively pushing outsiders to resort to scraping.
- Jkvngt 6y agoResearchers like Joan Donovan?