Twitter Terminates Academia API - How we're supporting researchers
On Tuesday, June 27th 2023, Members of academia who relied on utilizing Twitters’ Academic API for a myriad of cases, ranging from monitoring dis-information, to researching the spread of geo-political propaganda related to the invasion of Ukraine, woke up to the dismay of their app’s suddenly failing. Researchers swiftly took to the Twitter developer forum to express their concerns and unusual interactions with their level of access. Unsurprisingly, Twitter’s official moderation account on the forum displayed a blatant disregard for these questions, Going as far as answering an off-topic issue within the same thread
That lead members of academia and research to conclude Twitter has cut off access to their platform indefinitely, forcing users to pay upwards of $60,000 / year for a heavily rate-limited API endpoint. With researches, PhD students, and faulty relying on Twitter’s community forum-like platform to monitor and analyze social interactions, Those without the budget to pay up, or the time to go through the new verification process are left scrambling to alternatives like web-scraping, leveraging residential proxy networks like Stat Proxies ISP network to regain access to the platform’s open community.
By leveraging open source software (OSS), contributors on the code repository site, Github have combined packages like Beautiful Soup, Request libraries, and databases like redis and PostgreSQL to interact with the public facing API twitter users interact with when they navigate to the website itself.
Once again this calls into question the openness of platforms like Twitter, where its new owner dunks on rivals issues, yet ignores its own, and makes it increasingly more difficult to gain clarity.
If you are a student, member of an academic institution, or research organization who has been impacted by these recent changes, and require a proxy network to access the critical data generated by Twitter users, immediately reach out to us [at] hello@statproxies.com to learn how we can assist you at no cost.