Twitter and why I’m pausing my Elections Project.

The Twitter API used to be a really good API, allowing free access within certain limits. For most developers this was a fantastic resource, which is why the vast majority of academic literature has primarily used Twitter posts when conducting work on social media analysis. The API is really easy to use and most of all, it’s free to use, with additional privileges being given to those who apply for it. I personally had elevated access to Twitter’s API and as such had better rate limits than standard users. Sadly this is no more.

Twitter recently changed their API program, requiring users to pay for any meaningful access. The basic, free API appears to only allow access to create tweets - it seems as though pulling tweets and reading them is not free at all. If you want to move from the Free package, you can subscribe to the basic API plan which is \$100 a month. Even then, that only allows you to pull 10,000 tweets. If you want more than that, you are expected to purchase the Enterprise package. The price is not posted on Twitter’s website but from looking across the internet, it appears to start at \$42,000 a month for the lowest tier, and increases up to \$210,000 a month.

This is for access to an API which up until now was largely free-to-use and where the content is generated by us, the users of the service. It’s not just crazy, it’s a completely ridiculous sum of money to be asking for and is nothing more than a cash grab. This matters because it is data that is generated by us, the users. It should be open to all of us to access, use and analyse.

Social media analysis allows us to detect misinformation, it allows us to combat it as well. It also allows researchers to see what is important to the public (or rather the sample of the public who use Twitter), it allows for bot networks to be dismantled.

Importantly, Twitter is probably in the position it is as a big social media network because of the developer ecosystem that has grown around it, with Python libraries being written such as Tweepy, Twarc etc to access Twitter data. I myself as part of my elections project have written a GUI program that makes it easier for users of the streaming API to interface with it. Sadly such projects will no longer be actively supported, as volunteer contributors can not and will not pay out \$42,000 a month because Musk paid too much for Twitter.

As a result of the changes that have occurred to Twitter, this sadly means that my elections project will be on pause indefinitely until the API changes happen. To even access the Streaming API to collect the tweets necessary to conduct the analysis will result in me having to pay \$42,000 a month - an amount that is simply not possible to pay out.