Twitter API: The end of an era

Since Elon Musk's first announcement in February 2023 to shut down free access to the Twitter API in mid-February, we were aware of challenging times. DeLab is currently build around two social media platforms: Twitter and Reddit. For both platforms, we have downloaded data, extracted features, ran regressions, and designed experiments to succeed in building a virtual moderator. Two weeks ago, finally, our Twitter API access to the data warehouse was shut down. This is a pitty, not only for us, but for the whole scholarly community. We have learned so much from analyzing tweets and and would have liked to invest more time and efforts in making Twitter a friendlier place.

We still believe in our mission but will focus on different platforms: On the one hand, we will continue our efforts in analyzing Reddit posts; even though we are aware of Reddit facing some similar issues as Twitter. On the other hand, we are currently extending the number of platforms to mastodon, a free and open-source social media software. Contrary to Twitter and Reddit, Mastodon is a self-hosted service. For instance, the university computing center for the University of Göttingen hosts its own instance of mastodon.

To fit the new requirements, our current technical framework needs some revisions. Although Twitter, Reddit, and Mastodon are somehow similar, they differ in some important aspects. For instance, we cannot just transfer our Twitter search queries to Mastodon, but need to make some adjustments. And we need to adapt our DeLab database to store the new incoming data. The differences are not only limited to the technical framework, but also to other social relevant indicators. Reddit and Mastodon also differ with regard to their audience -- and this might have some serious implications for our research. Stay tuned!