Twitter is opening up insight into its stream of tweets, so that researchers can track both the spread of covid-19 and the misinformation put out about the disease. In a developer blog, Twitter said it was releasing a streaming endpoint into Twitter Developer Labs. The company said the move will provide a real-time stream of public message marked by a set of defined parameters and filters. The result is a comprehensive view of the conversation of Covid-19.
Twitter said the data could also be used by other approved applicants working on crisis management, emergency response or communication within communities, as well as those developing machine learning and data tools to help the scientific community understand covid-19. The main criteria was that researchers must be working towards the “public good” and respect privacy safeguards.
Reuters noted an open letter sent last week by 75 groups and individuals, including digital rights and free speech organisations, to social media platforms, asking them to preserve and publish their content moderation data.
Twitter said however that once tweets were taken down, they would have to be removed from the covid-19 data set. Twitter said it had never offered a full stream on a particular topic before, and that it represented tens of thousands of dollars per month in data.
