From being advocates of humanities and social science research based on Twitter activity, academics are now dissuading their students from using the social media platform that has become X. The reason is the end of the free API, the programming interface that connects software programs so they can exchange data. But it's not only that.

Back in 2009, Nikos Smyrnaios, professor of information and communication sciences at the University of Toulouse-III, and Bernhard Rieder, senior lecturer in the same discipline at the University of Amsterdam, collected over 5.8 million tweets to study the distribution of news on the network. They did so using data extraction and analysis software based on Twitter's API (DMI-TCAT). Since then, Rieder has designed open-source software to enable such work on some 20 platforms as part of the CAT4SMR (Capture and Analysis Tools for Social Media Research) project.

That was before October 2022 and Elon Musk's takeover of the little blue bird. Smyrnaios has stopped all study of X due to a lack of access to the platform's data. While Twitter has long been a favored field of investigation for research, due to the public nature of its data and its use by numerous political and media players, the professor now discourages his students from studying it quantitatively. "As a thesis supervisor, I'm not going to encourage a student to work on a subject that would require a quantitative approach, because it won't be possible," he explained.

Rieder does believe that conducting quantitative surveys on X is still feasible and worthwhile, despite a 16% year-on-year drop in its daily user numbers (September figure from US firm Sensor Tower). He admitted, however, that the change in API access arrangements complicates the study of X and has scuttled some of his work. The software he designed can no longer be used by the scientific community free of charge.

When it was announced that the API would no longer be free, researchers and PhD students rushed to collect all the data they needed. But some projects had to be abandoned. One of Rieder's students, who had written a dissertation on the functioning of X's API, had to give up writing an article on the subject, as his results had been rendered obsolete.

In concrete terms, carrying out a research project on content from this social media network costs $5,000 per month (€4,600), according to Rieder. What's more, researchers are now limited to 1 million tweets, compared with several million previously.

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