Twitter gives COVID-19 tweets to certain website developers

🔊 Listen to this post Now in English

Twitter is once again helping researchers by updating the API to access more public discussions.

Twitter API allows developers and researchers to study public conversations around COVID-19 thanks to an update to its API. According to Twitter, this update will give access to millions of tweets per day, since researchers approved by this program will be able to access all the tweets evoking the pandemic or related to the coronavirus.

This data will be used to understand several things and carry out research on a whole series of subjects related to the pandemic, in particular on the spread of the disease, the dissemination of fake news, crisis management in communities and many other subjects. again.

Twitter adds that developers can request access to this API to build learning tools to help scientists answer key questions about COVID-19. Obviously, the content provided will not be completely raw, the social network has indicated that spam and tweets of poor quality will be filtered.

Who will have access to this data?
Access to this API will be completely free, but it is the Twitter teams in person who will select who will or will not have access to this program. To do this, developers and researchers will have to show white dough by detailing to Twitter their project plan, their experiences with big data and indicate the available resources they have to process such a set of data.

In its announcement, Twitter explains: “Given the expertise and IT resources necessary to process this data, and recognizing the sensitivity of this, we have created a dedicated application to access this end point and plan to examine attentively access requests to ensure that they support the public good. We also encourage requesters to describe in detail the protective measures they intend to implement to protect the privacy and security of the persons represented in this data, including applicable institutional reviews and ethical controls ” .

You will understand, despite the opening of this API, you will have to be an experienced developer and know how to safely handle such a quantity of data to have access to it, and that is reassuring.