Academic Research

[nicola_nkl]

Hello,

I am based at a UK university, and am conducting academic research that involves analysis of language used in tweets related to the environment and renewable energy.

Can you also confirm if it is permissible to manually collect a data sample by using the Advanced Search function for hashtags and copying/pasting small samples of results for analysis (<5000)?

Can you clarify if it is permissible to utilise select example tweets within academic publications?

Many thanks,
Nicola

[yoyoel]

Hi! Thanks for the question, and for your interest in doing research using Twitter data.

A few important points to bear in mind:

• The best way to get access to Tweets is using our developer products and APIs, which provide programmatic access to the full public content of Tweets. Manual collection of data from the Search product on Twitter, in addition to being time-consuming and difficult, may run into issues of research validity and replicability, since our Search products display the most relevant Tweets for you. Also, please note that the Terms of Service explicitly prohibit scraping the Twitter web interface:

Crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without the prior consent of Twitter is expressly prohibited

• For data obtained via our APIs, be mindful of the requirements in the Developer Policy regarding the storage and redistribution of Tweets and user information. In general, storing fewer than 5000 Tweets is permitted under our rules.
• You should be mindful of user privacy whenever you include specific example Tweets in publications. Many researchers find that anonymizing, deidentifying, or aggregating Tweets is a good way to present information derived from Twitter data without worrying about privacy. Your university IRB may have additional guidelines to follow here, and organizations like the Association of Internet Researchers have published lots of helpful resources regarding ethical guidelines for internet research that you may want to review.

Good luck with your research!

[andypiper]