Twitter’s Decahose Costs Researchers $42K

Soon, researchers will be required to pay $42,000 per month to continue using Twitter’s formerly free Decahose data service and to retain their data.

Decahose, a streaming service that provides researchers unrestricted access to approximately 10% of all tweets in real-time, has been a mainstay for academic research on various topics, such as emergency response, law enforcement-related activities, political misinformation, and extremism.

Twitter announced earlier this year, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company, that it would begin charging $100 to $42,000 per month for access to its numerous APIs.

Under the new rules, academic institutions using the Decahose service would be required to pay the “enterprise” fee of $42,000 per month, and the amount of available data would reportedly decrease from 10% of all live tweets to 0.3%.

According to a report from the British news source i news, researchers were recently notified via email that they could either begin paying for access or delete any data they have obtained.

According to the publication, the email stated that researchers who do not sign up for the paid service “must delete all Twitter data stored and cached on their systems.”

Researchers will also need to post screenshots “that demonstrate removal evidence.” The newspaper reported that they will have 30 days after their agreement expires to complete the process.

This change comes mere days after Musk joined Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in announcing DeSantis’ candidacy for the White House in the 2024 United States presidential election.

If implemented as planned, the impending change to Decahose access could impede global efforts to study election misinformation and social manipulation in advance of the 2024 election on what has been described as one of the most politically active social media platforms in the world.

In addition to limiting misinformation research, the price changes would impede academics’ ability to study internet-related crimes such as human trafficking and financial scams.

Moreover, Decahose has served as one of the internet’s largest repositories of human sentiment — a data source that drives insights and predictions on virtually every imaginable societal research topic.

Twitter and Reddit data silos provide most of the data used to analyze cryptocurrency sentiment, for example. By restricting access to this information, Twitter may impede ongoing research and new endeavors.

One possible explanation for the price increase is Musk’s ongoing efforts to prevent technology companies from using Twitter’s data to train artificial intelligence systems.