They rejected my application. I got a letter from them stating that ‘We are unable to serve your use case at this time’.
My case research is my proposal I spent more than 10 months developing the proposal and all my methods come directly from the literature after systematically reviewing related papers some papers I found analysed more than 1 billion tweets.
So why they rejected me?
My subject is arabic tweets, my topic is health and there is no much work in the combination of these two things in the literature. If we talk about arabic tweets and politics yes there is too many works. Arabic and public opinion yes there is too many works. But arabic tweets and health, there is no much works. Even western institutes who analyse Twitter data, they are mostly looking at arabic and politics related topics. This might suggest, Twitter granted access for organisations who interest in arabic tweets, if they only analyse tweets for politics and public opinions!
Yes I know, I’m an individual case so I cannot generalise my case. However, I have seen here on Twitter forum, one academic educators has been offered different scenario (case of academic educators access). As a researcher when a company like Twitter act as a gatekeeper, I believe it is ethical to give equal opportunity to the researchers regardless of any other considerations, of course except ethical reasons.
I don’t believe I break any Twitter policy at all. I knew them very well! and it is the reason why I wrote the above statement.
However, having said this. I don’t believe their rejection is due to some personal opinions but I’m in doubt about the organisational culture!
Best regards,
Yahya
