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  • WORLD VIEW

The new Twitter is changing rapidly — study it before it’s too late

Social-media researchers overemphasized the platform now called X for years. But now, as it rapidly changes into something new and frightening, we risk paying too little attention.
  1. Mike Caulfield

    1. Mike Caulfield is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public in Seattle, and co-author of the book Verified.

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Last month, my team at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public in Seattle looked at data from X (formerly Twitter) to find the most influential voices in the discourse surrounding the Israel–Hamas war (see go.nature.com/3qwdi). X no longer offers researchers free access to the application programming interface (API), which allowed us to extract and process large amounts of data from the platform. Researchers now have to pay, and the cost is beyond the reach of most. This was one of our first major analyses without the API — and we found it difficult. It took more than a week to answer questions that once took only an afternoon. We had only partial data, collected from a set of content with high engagement that was accessible through the public search interface. In conversations among our team, sentences that began with, “If we still had access to the API ...” became a running theme.

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Nature 623, 225 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03483-8

Competing Interests

M.C. is currently engaged in paid consulting with Google on development of media literacy initiatives.

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