Social media researchers take note: Twitter begins charging for API access

If you're doing computational research on social media, you might have noticed that Twitter has just moved from a free model for data access for computational research to a paid model.

The platform is now offering a low level of API usage for $100/month. Details about different pricing models and the levels of access offered are forthcoming. Twitter does already have a premium tier for API use that charges a user based on their numbers of requests for data.

Researchers have long been using Twitter’s API to gather data on the hundreds of millions of tweets sent daily. The issues around the implications for Twitter’s policy change are gone into detail in a helpful article in a recent issue of Science. Researchers—and particularly those without funding—may wish to secure their dataset if they have been working on a project using this data.