Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news from March 13, researchers can now access and analyze large amounts of data generated on social media platforms for free. But Twitter plans to charge users for data access to the platform at a starting price of $42000 a month (currently about 291000 yuan). Researchers complain that the fees are too high and that there is too little data access.

Since its inception in 2006, social media platform Twitter has played an important role in the social media field, in part because many media people publish all kinds of information on the platform, but also because Twitter is willing to open up data to researchers. Scholars have free access to Twitter's application programming interface (API) to get all kinds of information and data on the platform, which helps them understand what the entire online world is talking about.

Many researchers have used Twitter's API. Since 2020, more than 17500 academic papers have been analyzed based on data from the Twitter platform, reinforcing what Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has long claimed: the Twitter platform is a "de facto city square".

But the new Twitter rules show that most scholars and organizations that rely on API access for research will no longer be able to use Twitter.

On February 2 this year, Musk announced that the platform API access would set up a paywall within a week. A week later, he decided to postpone the launch of the measure until February 13. As a result, this deadline has passed because of the outage of Twitter.

But according to a document sent by Twitter customer representatives to a number of academic clients in early March, the company now plans to offer three levels of Enterprise Packages to relevant users on the developer platform. The cheapest Small Package costs $42000 a month and has access to 50 million tweets. A higher level allows researchers or companies to access more data, 100 million and 200 million tweets, respectively, at a monthly cost of $125000 and $210000, respectively. Many free users of the existing Twitter API confirmed the news, receiving emails from Twitter saying that the new pricing plan would take effect within a few months.

"I don't know if there are any scholars on earth who can afford $42000 a month," said Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor at Binghamton University in New York and a member of iDRAMA Lab. IDRAMA Labs specializes in analyzing bad content on social media.

For subscribers to the cheapest Twitter enterprise packages, the number of real-time tracking API rules they set up to filter data will be limited to 25000, while the number of queries to the full archive search API will be limited to 50,000. The number of Twitter accounts that researchers can analyze through account activity API will be limited to 5000, and a maximum of 20 requests can be made per minute through user engagement API.

Although the content in the Twitter enterprise package sounds like a huge data set, the actual accessible content accounts for only about 0.3% of the information generated by Twitter each month, which means that the information paid by researchers is far from reflecting all the activities on the Twitter platform. By contrast, Twitter's current free API access mechanism allows researchers to access 1 per cent of all tweets.

Elissa M. Redmiles, an instructor at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, said the new price is unacceptable. "it's probably more than any academic budget I've ever heard of," she said. " She added that the price would affect any long-term analysis of the mood of social media users. "one month of Twitter data doesn't really achieve the purpose of the study," Reid Myers said. "

Kenneth Kenneth Joseph, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo (University of Buffalo), recently published a collaborative paper analyzing Twitter's daily activity. He said the new pricing measures actually killed his career. "No matter what reasonable way I go, I can't afford to spend $42000 a month," Joseph said. "it completely destroys any opportunity for me to do research in this field, where most of my career is based."

Researchers can still access Twitter data through the existing API protocol, but they worry that the agreement could be terminated at any time. The new costs, they say, are "not feasible for academia".

"Nobody can afford to pay that much," the researchers said. "even the richest institutions can't afford to buy a small amount of data for $500000 a year."

It is not clear which users Twitter's new pricing model is aimed at. Nir Grinberg, an assistant professor of software and information systems engineering at Ben-Gurion University (Ben-Gurion University) in Israel, used to work for a start-up that uses Twitter data.

"the increase is too large for users who access a small amount of data. a few months ago, 1 per cent of Twitter's content was accessible for free. Twitter now offers only 0.3 per cent of the data, provided it pays $500000 a year." "this is crazy," Greenberg said. To be honest, I don't know who can set aside a budget for this. "

The researchers say the damage is not just academic research. Twitter is also an important data set that can help people understand how the Internet works and what conversations are taking place on the platform.

Joseph admits that he can also study other social media platforms. But he says the Twitter platform has media journalists, senior officials and business decision makers, making it an important area of research. "Twitter is a special platform for understanding elite discourse," he said. "for all of us trying to use this system to interpret the world, this is a hard pill to swallow."

However, Blackburn said researchers will continue to look for a way to analyze the content of the platform. "We have basically been out of touch with Facebook over the years, but we continue to make progress," he said. "the man burned 44 billion dollars on an unprofitable website to force all users to read his spam posts. Scientific research will not be hijacked by such people."

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