Researchers using Twitter's previously free Decahose data service will soon have to pay a $42,000 monthly fee to keep using the service and keep their data.
Decahose, a streaming service that gives scientists unrestricted real-time access to about 10 percent of all tweets, has been a mainstay of academic research on myriad topics, including emergency response, law enforcement-related activities, political misinformation and extremism . Earlier this year , Twitter announced it would start charging anywhere from $100 to $42,000 a month for access to its many APIs, following billionaire Elon Musk's acquisition of the company.
Under the new rules, academics and universities using Decahose's service will be required to pay a monthly "enterprise" fee of $42,000, and the amount of available data will reportedly drop from 10 percent of the total number of live tweets to 0.3 percent. According to the UK publication i news, researchers recently received an email explaining that they could start paying for access or delete any data they obtained:
According to the publication, the email states that researchers who do not opt into the paid service "will need to delete all Twitter data stored and cached on your system." Researchers will also be required to post "screenshots showing evidence of the deletion." After the deal expires, they will have 30 days to complete the process, the paper reported.
The timing of the change is notable because it comes just days after Musk joined Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in announcing that the latter would run for the White House in the 2024 US presidential election. If carried out as planned, the imminent change to access to Decahose could stifle global efforts to study election misinformation and social manipulation as it happens ahead of the 2024 election, which is described as one of the world's most active political social media platforms Before. In addition to misinformation research, the price change will limit the ability of academics to study Internet-related crimes such as human trafficking and financial fraud. In addition,Decahose has become one of the largest repositories of human emotion on the Internet—a source of data that can drive insights and predictions on nearly every socially relevant research topic imaginable. For example, much of the data used to study cryptocurrency sentiment comes from Twitter and Reddit data silos. By restricting access to this data, Twitter could hinder ongoing research and block new efforts.
One explanation for the price increase could have to do with Musk's ongoing efforts to ensure tech companies don't use Twitter's data to train their artificial intelligence systems.
