Twitter’s Decahose data service, which provides real-time access to roughly 10% of all tweets, will now cost academics and researchers $42,000 a month. The service has been central to many research fields, including emergency-response, law enforcement, political misinformation, and extremism. Researchers who do not pay will have to delete any data they have curated using the service. The cost of access reflects a wider change on the platform; Twitter has introduced charges for all its APIs, from $100 to tens of thousands of dollars per month. The changes come as academics adapt research processes to avoid reflecting political bias.
The change could hamper research into social manipulation and election misinformation in advance of the 2024 US presidential election, which is taking place on one of the world’s most politically active social media platforms. Furthermore, the changes will limit academia’s ability to study internet-related crimes such as human trafficking and financial scams. One key source of data is Twitter and Reddit data silos, which have been used to study cryptocurrency sentiment. The explanation for the price increase could include concerns from Elon Musk over the use of such data in training AI systems.
About the author - J-S Tremblay
I've been involved in the cryptocurrency world since 2016 and trading since 2019. I started Moon and Lambo in 2021. I'm passionate about crypto and love to share my knowledge. I hate bankers and I hope that cryptocurrency will change the financial world for the better. View full profile...
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