Twitter’s $42k-per-month API prices out nearly everyone(wired.com)
wired.com
Twitter’s $42k-per-month API prices out nearly everyone
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-nearly-everyone/
232 comments
https://archive.ph/mxifu
...Blackburn, however, says researchers will continue to find a way to scrutinize what’s happening on Twitter. “We’ve been mostly cut off from Facebook for years and we’ve continued to make progress,” he says. “It’s not like science is going to be held hostage by a guy that played himself into burning $44 billion on a website that makes no money, just so he could force all its users to read his shitposts.”
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AdObserver is a project of Cybersecurity for Democracy at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. This extension was originally developed by researchers from the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, Quartz, New York University, and the University of Grenoble. Technical advice was also provided by ProPublica, WhoTargetsMe, and The Globe And Mail.
https://adobserver.org/
AdObserver is a project of Cybersecurity for Democracy at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. This extension was originally developed by researchers from the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, Quartz, New York University, and the University of Grenoble. Technical advice was also provided by ProPublica, WhoTargetsMe, and The Globe And Mail.
"If you think Cambridge Analytical was great, try this thing that's even better!"
To be clear, people should not be using this thing that has no limits on what data it could be consuming. The CA thing people were upset about was that one user could give CA permission to read their FB data and that meant that CA had access to anything that that user had access to (like data that their friends shared with them). This is the same, without it even pretending to be limited by the restrictions that CA was limited by.
The code is open source on GitHub.
https://github.com/CybersecurityForDemocracy/social-media-co...
https://github.com/CybersecurityForDemocracy/social-media-co...
user3939382(3)
All of these moves make sense when you zoom out and realize Musk has no interest in Twitter as a business. It is a megaphone to amplify his own voice and the voices that support his viewpoints. Having third party API consumers able to pull in content and reorder it other than how he wants it presented is counter to that goal.
The genius of Fox News was "why spend money on buying political attack ads when you can just buy the network and run them all day long." Twitter is just becoming that too.
The genius of Fox News was "why spend money on buying political attack ads when you can just buy the network and run them all day long." Twitter is just becoming that too.
I would love to see this "buying social media company to force everyone to pay attention to you"incorporated into the last season of Succession, although I am sure it was my mostly written before all of this Musk Twitter drama.
> The genius of Fox News was "why spend money on buying political attack ads when you can just buy the network and run them all day long."
No, that's a misunderstanding. What Fox News cares about is growing and maintaining an audience because that's what profitable. In pursuit of that profit, Fox News will foster its community however it can.
And so, driven by profit seeking, Fox News has embraced total nihilism. Fox News will spin any narrative, tell any lie, invent any fiction if it thinks it is what its audience wants to hear. The more Fox News offers its audience comforting fictions, no matter how untrue, the better for the bottom line.
You don't have to believe me on that. It's what Fox News says of itself:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/08/tucker-car...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/fox-news-d...
No, that's a misunderstanding. What Fox News cares about is growing and maintaining an audience because that's what profitable. In pursuit of that profit, Fox News will foster its community however it can.
And so, driven by profit seeking, Fox News has embraced total nihilism. Fox News will spin any narrative, tell any lie, invent any fiction if it thinks it is what its audience wants to hear. The more Fox News offers its audience comforting fictions, no matter how untrue, the better for the bottom line.
You don't have to believe me on that. It's what Fox News says of itself:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/08/tucker-car...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/fox-news-d...
fox news was quite literally built as an answer to "how do we stop watergate from happening again to the republican party"
look up the roger ailes papers from when it was founded
look up the roger ailes papers from when it was founded
Why do we have to tell the people what they need to hear? Why can't we just tell them what they wanna hear?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWenPDBtMw4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWenPDBtMw4
That might make economic sense if you build it with relatively small investment from the ground up.
Doesn't make economic sense at all if you buy it for $44 billion when it was already on shakey financial grounds.
Doesn't make economic sense at all if you buy it for $44 billion when it was already on shakey financial grounds.
Also consistent with his stated goal of making the business profitable.
> Also consistent with his stated goal of making the business profitable.
It was profitable. He caused it to hurtle toward bankruptcy.
It was profitable. He caused it to hurtle toward bankruptcy.
Did he? My understanding was that it was not profitable and that he's been cutting costs and exploring new sources of income (Twitter Blue, API fee, etc.). I don't know if he'll be successful but his actions seem consistent with him caring about Twitter as a business. In fact, he seems to have sacrificed his public image considerably towards that goal (not consistent with him mostly caring about his "megaphone").
It made a profit 2 years before he bought it. And the only reason it made a loss the last complete fiscal year before he bought it was due to a massive > $1Bn FCC (or FTC?) fine.
Twitter’s underlying business was already profitable.
Twitter’s underlying business was already profitable.
Your understanding is wrong, I’m afraid. Twitter was profitable before the acquisition. (If you look this up don’t be misled by the once-off loss caused by losing a legal case).
Do you have a source on that? I've read several articles claiming that Twitter was only ever profitable in 2018-2019. e.g.
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2022/12/21/twitter-and-its-f...:
> Twitter has been operating at a massive loss for years, failing to book an annual profit since 2019 (Mauer, 2022). For eight out of the last ten years, the company has posted a loss.
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2022/12/21/twitter-and-its-f...:
> Twitter has been operating at a massive loss for years, failing to book an annual profit since 2019 (Mauer, 2022). For eight out of the last ten years, the company has posted a loss.
It was profitable those 2 years, then they lost a big lawsuit which caused a pretty big loss in 2020. But overall since its IPO 2013 and 2020 were the only years where its cashflow actually got worse - overall it was trending towards a more sustainable cashflow. By silicon valley/US corporation standards that's far from a dumpster fire or anything.
https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
TWTR has underperformed nasdaq by a factor of 2 since going public. It's been a woefully inefficient organization and there's no amount of political bias that can paper over that.
Which has very little to do with profit.
> He caused
He almost certainly caused some advertisers to leave, but as a reference snapchat had similar decreases in advertising spend, so its hard to argue this is all Musk and not considerably due to economic conditions and apple's privacy changes
He almost certainly caused some advertisers to leave, but as a reference snapchat had similar decreases in advertising spend, so its hard to argue this is all Musk and not considerably due to economic conditions and apple's privacy changes
That remains to be seen...
I would not be surprised if he could have offered the api $420/mo and 100x more apps were willing and/or able to pay.
I would not be surprised if he could have offered the api $420/mo and 100x more apps were willing and/or able to pay.
I’m not sure saddling twitter with more debt does that.
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But these third parties brought traffic and helped Twitter being relevant.
"All of these moves make sense when you zoom out and realize Musk has no interest in Twitter as a business. It is a megaphone to amplify his own voice and the voices that support his viewpoints. Having third party API consumers able to pull in content and reorder it other than how he wants it presented is counter to that goal."
I don't remember being a highly profitable venture before, so what was the previous owners intentions with owning the business but not caring if it generated a reasonable return?
What propaganda were they spewing?
I don't remember being a highly profitable venture before, so what was the previous owners intentions with owning the business but not caring if it generated a reasonable return?
What propaganda were they spewing?
> I don’t remember being a highly profitable venture before
It was profitable on an ongoing basis (the most recent reported period had a one-time charge that made it unprofitable, IIRC) though not “highly profitable”. Since the Musk takeover was announced – leading to forward advertising sales drying up even before it was consummated – its been (by Musk’s own description, including as to the timing, though he places the blame elsewhere) hurtling toward bankruptcy.
It was profitable on an ongoing basis (the most recent reported period had a one-time charge that made it unprofitable, IIRC) though not “highly profitable”. Since the Musk takeover was announced – leading to forward advertising sales drying up even before it was consummated – its been (by Musk’s own description, including as to the timing, though he places the blame elsewhere) hurtling toward bankruptcy.
Except that Fox is profitable, and it isn’t clear how much musk is willing or able to pay out of his own pocket for the privilege. I don’t think he planned for that.
Whoever Controls the Media, Controls the Mind.
- Jim Morrison
- Jim Morrison
Precisely. That is his end goal to spread right wing viewpoints.
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/30/elon-musk-paul-pelosi-tweet...
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/30/elon-musk-paul-pelosi-tweet...
What are his viewpoints and how are they amplified considering anybody can post anything?
>What are his viewpoints and how are they amplified considering anybody can post anything?
It's more complicated than just the ability to post. Never discount the power of the algorithm. And that can be tinkered with:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-15/musk-forc...
It's more complicated than just the ability to post. Never discount the power of the algorithm. And that can be tinkered with:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-15/musk-forc...
recuter(2)
>What are his viewpoints
Musk is very vocal about his far-right views. He's anti-union, anti-public health, etc.
>how are they amplified considering anybody can post anything?
Anyone can post anything, but Musk can and has systemically prioritized his tweets over organic content.
Musk is very vocal about his far-right views. He's anti-union, anti-public health, etc.
>how are they amplified considering anybody can post anything?
Anyone can post anything, but Musk can and has systemically prioritized his tweets over organic content.
Whoah whoah whoa. I don't care for Elon, but let's be intentional about using "far-right". [Caveat: Assume USA left and right parties are discussed] If we keep throwing that around when we mean right leaning or politically right views then anyone on the right is going to be "far-right" and we're never going to work together. I think that the other comments to you are to point out where Elon has fascist or Nazism beliefs. Maybe use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics as a start?
Elon is far-right. I meant what I said and I said what I meant. I'm very familiar with far-right ideology. No need to link to Wikipedia
>If we keep throwing that around when we mean right leaning or politically right views then anyone on the right is going to be "far-right
The GOP is a far-right political party. They are fundamentally anti-democracy.
>and we're never going to work together.
We aren't going to work together regardless because the far-right GOP doesn't want the same things as most Americans. They are a political minority that can wreak havoc on the country due to poorly thought electoral systems.
>I think that the other comments to you are to point out where Elon has fascist or Nazism beliefs.
There is more to the far-right than having Nazism beliefs. American far-right is Christian Fascist. Elon Musk is a fascist a la Henry Ford.
>If we keep throwing that around when we mean right leaning or politically right views then anyone on the right is going to be "far-right
The GOP is a far-right political party. They are fundamentally anti-democracy.
>and we're never going to work together.
We aren't going to work together regardless because the far-right GOP doesn't want the same things as most Americans. They are a political minority that can wreak havoc on the country due to poorly thought electoral systems.
>I think that the other comments to you are to point out where Elon has fascist or Nazism beliefs.
There is more to the far-right than having Nazism beliefs. American far-right is Christian Fascist. Elon Musk is a fascist a la Henry Ford.
Ok, let's keep throwing out accusations without any proof. Umm...Elon...Elon once told the queen of England that he wishes he could be a queen!
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/elon-...
He provides vocal and material support to fascist and far-right causes such as vaccine conspiracies and transphobia. He's anti-labor, anti-safety regulations.
I'm guessing you're one of those folks who want to pretend he's not far-right until he openly wears a swastika.
He provides vocal and material support to fascist and far-right causes such as vaccine conspiracies and transphobia. He's anti-labor, anti-safety regulations.
I'm guessing you're one of those folks who want to pretend he's not far-right until he openly wears a swastika.
Linked "article" quotes this tweet of his:
Heh. I have a disdain for throwing shade and hyperbole, am I also far right cmh89? :)
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci
Heh. I have a disdain for throwing shade and hyperbole, am I also far right cmh89? :)
>Heh. I have a disdain for throwing shade and hyperbole, am I also far right cmh89? :)
I don't know. How often do you pal around with far-right people and help spread their rhetoric? That would be a good indicator. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, its probably a duck.
Likewise, Musk has adopted far-right talking points, wants far-right approval, and supports far-right causes. He's probably a duck huh
I don't know. How often do you pal around with far-right people and help spread their rhetoric? That would be a good indicator. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, its probably a duck.
Likewise, Musk has adopted far-right talking points, wants far-right approval, and supports far-right causes. He's probably a duck huh
His views are not far right, even by European standards. He's ordinary right, just mixed with an extra helping of dick, twat, and ego.
> Anyone can post anything, but Musk can and has systemically prioritized his tweets over organic content.
I'd be interested in any sort of proof.
> Musk is very vocal about his far-right views. He's anti-union, anti-public health, etc.
Please show specific examples of his far-right views, so I can understand what specifically you mean by that term other than things you personally find disagreeable.
I'd be interested in any sort of proof.
> Musk is very vocal about his far-right views. He's anti-union, anti-public health, etc.
Please show specific examples of his far-right views, so I can understand what specifically you mean by that term other than things you personally find disagreeable.
> I'd be interested in any sort of proof.
Have you been paying attention? https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets... "This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained by Platformer."
Have you been paying attention? https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets... "This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained by Platformer."
The question was to understand how Elon has far-right views (e.g. Nazism). What you provided is an article that shows Elon as narcissistic. I wouldn't call that the same.
I'm responding to the first point:
> Anyone can post anything, but Musk can and has systemically prioritized his tweets over organic content.
> Anyone can post anything, but Musk can and has systemically prioritized his tweets over organic content.
recuter(2)
[deleted]
>Musk is very vocal about his far-right views. He's anti-union, anti-public health, etc.
When any amount of right wing is far right, it just show how far left your perspective is. And if you think far right is in any way worse than far left, that's just more evidence of the same. They're the same people, just with opposite causes.
When any amount of right wing is far right, it just show how far left your perspective is. And if you think far right is in any way worse than far left, that's just more evidence of the same. They're the same people, just with opposite causes.
The far right as grown MUCH crazier over the last 30 years than the far left, mainly thanks to dedicated propaganda outlets like Fox News brainwashing people.
What an absurd statement - everything he's done is to make twitter profitable and viable as a business - reduced headcount, reduced systems, reduced perks, .... He was already high profile in numerous spheres so no amplification was required. It's obvious that you don't share his viewpoints, and so you're simply slinging mud. It's the opinion of many that Musk didn't even want twitter, as a megaphone or otherwise, that he screwed up, obligating himself, and now has to make a successful business of it.
Can you please make your substantive points without name-calling ("what an absurd statement") or swipes ("It's obvious that you don't share his viewpoints, and so you're simply slinging mud")? The site guidelines specifically ask commenters to avoid those things, and your post would be just fine without them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not the greatest Musk fan but IMHO his approach to charge those who benefits from Twitter is spot on and I'm actually rooting for him to be able to find a viable business model which does not rely on selling my attention to highest bidder.
If you are going to influence people, pay for the reach and If you are going to mine data, pay for the data. I guess the exact pricing can be adjusted according to the market needs but I agree with the paid access approach.
If you are going to influence people, pay for the reach and If you are going to mine data, pay for the data. I guess the exact pricing can be adjusted according to the market needs but I agree with the paid access approach.
Academics don't resell the data to others. In fact, their existing agreements with Twitter requires their published datasets (for reproducibility) to be anonymized precisely to ensure they don't become a commercial goldmine.
Given that most of the article is about the pricing tiers for academic use, based on marketing communications to universities, your comment seems strangely indifferent to the context of this news. These proposed costs are unaffordable precisely because academics are not running a business around the data. If the article were about enterprise data sales, your point would make sense.
Given that most of the article is about the pricing tiers for academic use, based on marketing communications to universities, your comment seems strangely indifferent to the context of this news. These proposed costs are unaffordable precisely because academics are not running a business around the data. If the article were about enterprise data sales, your point would make sense.
Academic work has all kinds of costs, why should data be free of charge?
As you say, Academics are pretty used to paying for access to data, services, material, etc., but $42k-per-month for limited access to Twitter sounds more like a "fuck off" price than anything else.
How many researchers can and will pay $42k per month for access? What's the market size here? Is this anything more than a drop in the bucket for Twitter?
I don't know but it's theirs to sell and find the right price.
> Is this anything more than a drop in the bucket for Twitter?
I don't know, Twitter were selling office furniture and cutting on the food on campus. So maybe it's not just a drop in the bucket after all?
> Is this anything more than a drop in the bucket for Twitter?
I don't know, Twitter were selling office furniture and cutting on the food on campus. So maybe it's not just a drop in the bucket after all?
There's pretty huge gap between $0 a month and $42,000. Even a year of data would require pretty huge grant.
Well I guarantee you the research project I worked on is now gonna get shut down because of this.
Academic work has costs but nothing like 42k per month, if anything that was the entire budget allocation for one RA's salary for 80% of the year.
The current project I am on now, has only been allocated 250k for multiple people (3 RAs) working on it for the year.
Academic work has costs but nothing like 42k per month, if anything that was the entire budget allocation for one RA's salary for 80% of the year.
The current project I am on now, has only been allocated 250k for multiple people (3 RAs) working on it for the year.
Sorry, no time for goalpost-chasing today.
doesn't have to be free but with every increase there will be less research that can afford to pay for the data and with the proposed pricing of $500.000 for 0.3% of tweets it seems that no-one will be willing to pay the price
Except if I want to buy some piece of academic research, they sell articles for as high at $60. Why aren’t academics complaining about the absurd costs for the public accessing their information?
Academics don't make money from academic publishing. In fact, they often have to pay exorbitant review fees to journals. There have been many, many HN threads about this part of the the publishing industry.
> Why aren’t academics complaining about the absurd costs for the public accessing their information?
They are. Loudly and consistently. Academics largely abhor the academic publishing industry, but feel trapped by it.
They are. Loudly and consistently. Academics largely abhor the academic publishing industry, but feel trapped by it.
Most academics (at least in Sweden). Get a lot of their articles from their University Library. Scihub is also an option if needed. If those options aren't possible then either request the library to buy it or to do it themselves. Besides it is way less than $43k.
Even then a lot of people are against the high cost
Even then a lot of people are against the high cost
Just email the academic and ask for the paper, it's the journals that are ripping everyone off.
... they are.
They do? Every single academic in the country supports open-access, lobbies their institutions to pay for the costs of open access. Every researcher will send you a copy of their article if you are paywalled and want to read it. And you, like all academics, know about Sci-Hub, so you should do what most academics do and use Sci-Hub to pirate the article to begin with.
I don't see anything positive coming out of academia having access to the Twitter firehose.
When I was in college we used it to try and try a sentiment analysis model since they are notoriously bad at detecting sarcasm and Twitter was full of sarcasm.
We also used the API to try and determine the most impacted areas after a natural disaster. Basically it would use the model we trained to try and read tweets of people that needed help or people tweeting about severe damage and group them by their coordinates.
The first one I agree isn’t really positive since it is just using other people’s data to train a model, but the second one could’ve been a useful tool to help EMS during a natural disaster.
We also used the API to try and determine the most impacted areas after a natural disaster. Basically it would use the model we trained to try and read tweets of people that needed help or people tweeting about severe damage and group them by their coordinates.
The first one I agree isn’t really positive since it is just using other people’s data to train a model, but the second one could’ve been a useful tool to help EMS during a natural disaster.
sigh this is just straight up wrong, I was an RA that worked on a real time social media analytics software. We were able to pick up on things like likely covid infections sites etc.
Try searching Google Scholar for "social bot", or to save time, just read this paper:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191
Academia has flooded the literature with >10,000 research papers based on the Twitter API feed. Virtually none of it is reproducible, it's frequently based on circular logic, the methodologies are unscientific and the conclusions are usually deeply partisan, but it nonetheless gets amplified by the media as "proof" of various false claims.
Count me in the camp of people who is happy Musk is doing this. I've been writing for years about the plague of "social bot" research coming out of academia that's based on the Twitter API:
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
Maybe your specific work on COVID was good, but it was certainly drowned out by the work that was sharply net negative for both society and science. Academic institutions were clearly never going to get the problem under control, so booting them out whilst allowing search engines and the like to continue accessing the feed seems like a good solution.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191
Academia has flooded the literature with >10,000 research papers based on the Twitter API feed. Virtually none of it is reproducible, it's frequently based on circular logic, the methodologies are unscientific and the conclusions are usually deeply partisan, but it nonetheless gets amplified by the media as "proof" of various false claims.
Count me in the camp of people who is happy Musk is doing this. I've been writing for years about the plague of "social bot" research coming out of academia that's based on the Twitter API:
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
Maybe your specific work on COVID was good, but it was certainly drowned out by the work that was sharply net negative for both society and science. Academic institutions were clearly never going to get the problem under control, so booting them out whilst allowing search engines and the like to continue accessing the feed seems like a good solution.
This is absurd; you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly, it is easy to find social science papers with terrible methodology that use the Twitter API, or that build on the sand of papers with terrible methodology.
But you conclude from that that all academic use of the Twitter API is garbage, which is nonsensical, and that preventing academics from studying Twitter at scale is the ideal solution. Your hyperbolic language (here and in your two medium articles, which I read thoroughly, along with the SSRN paper you cited*) does nothing for your own credibility.
The main 'methodology' of the SSRN paper is combing through other papers' datasets, contacting some of the identified 'bot' accounts, and establishing that they're operated by real people; the accounts as misidentified as bots when in reality the account operators were just aggressively quote-tweeting by using copy & paste to spread (eg) political or Qanon messages 200 times an hour. The authors point out that by really making an effort, Twitter users can tweet spam up to 25 times a minute, with no bots in sight! While the authors are quite correct to point out that people can be misidentified as bots, this completely ignores the fact of the unwanted spamming behavior. Pointing out the scientific flaws of 'tools' like Botometer is wholly valid, but the effort to research and develop tools for bot identification are a response to the fact of systematic information pollution, and most papers that try to address this issue are careful to offer caveats and qualifications about the limitations of their methods. It is not the fault of academics if media pundits over-simplify the fruits of their research.
Here are some examples of high quality research using data from Twitter:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336638958_Ephemeral...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334816353_Political...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361949311_QAnon_Pro...
But you conclude from that that all academic use of the Twitter API is garbage, which is nonsensical, and that preventing academics from studying Twitter at scale is the ideal solution. Your hyperbolic language (here and in your two medium articles, which I read thoroughly, along with the SSRN paper you cited*) does nothing for your own credibility.
The main 'methodology' of the SSRN paper is combing through other papers' datasets, contacting some of the identified 'bot' accounts, and establishing that they're operated by real people; the accounts as misidentified as bots when in reality the account operators were just aggressively quote-tweeting by using copy & paste to spread (eg) political or Qanon messages 200 times an hour. The authors point out that by really making an effort, Twitter users can tweet spam up to 25 times a minute, with no bots in sight! While the authors are quite correct to point out that people can be misidentified as bots, this completely ignores the fact of the unwanted spamming behavior. Pointing out the scientific flaws of 'tools' like Botometer is wholly valid, but the effort to research and develop tools for bot identification are a response to the fact of systematic information pollution, and most papers that try to address this issue are careful to offer caveats and qualifications about the limitations of their methods. It is not the fault of academics if media pundits over-simplify the fruits of their research.
Here are some examples of high quality research using data from Twitter:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336638958_Ephemeral...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334816353_Political...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361949311_QAnon_Pro...
OK, here's a review of your papers.
1. Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends
A good start! It makes relatively limited claims (they aren't trying to assert whole elections are being distorted by Twitter bots) and is indeed higher quality than the ones I've been citing. It actually makes its data available, which is a step forward. But it's had limited impact (28 citations), and it's also not particularly useful. All they're doing is revealing that there is ordinary spam, hijacking and SEO on Turkish Twitter, which was never in doubt. All social media sites have these problems and the authors were tipped off by some amateur third party that highlights these campaigns. Most of what they find is plain commercial spam, there's also some politics in there related to local Turkish issues like cab drivers protesting against Uber but there's no evidence presented that this is actually having a real impact on politics.
The main question here is why are universities spending grant money on subsidizing Twitter? The only people who can do anything with this paper are Twitter's spam team, there isn't generalizable new scientific knowledge coming out of it.
2. Political Astroturfing on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation Campaign
This one starts with a big claim, so it can at least say it's doing important research. But I really wonder why you suggested it because it actually agrees with us and even destroys the underlying premise of the entire field! A pretty useful paper that might be worth citing in future articles on the topic, in fact.
Firstly, their conclusion is that "if even a powerful and well-financed organization like the South Korean secret service cannot instigate a successful disinformation campaign, then this may be more difficult than often assumed in public debates". In other words, the supposed problem motivating this entire field of >10,000 papers doesn't actually exist: even government agencies fail to have impact when they try to sway opinions with Twitter.
Secondly, they accept that our criticisms of the field are correct. "We argue that past research’s predominant focus on automated accounts, famously known as “social bots” ... misses its target since reports on recent astroturfing campaigns suggest that they are often at least partially run by actual humans" and "Because a ground truth is rarely available, systematic research into astroturfing campaigns is lacking".
They also dunk on ML models on page three, and admit that "these studies still largely focus on anecdotes and lack a theory-driven framework" i.e. are more like blog posts than scientific research. These were all points being made by Gallwitz, Kreil and myself years ago.
The paper does have issues! Still, they should get some cred for being honest about their findings, albeit on the penultimate page of a 25 page study. The first sentence of the paper is phrased in a misleading way: they assert that astroturfing on Twitter has the potential to influence politics, but their conclusion is that it actually doesn't. That's a problem that you see a lot when reading papers in some fields.
Paper 3. QAnon Propaganda on Twitter as Information Warfare.
Note that this paper also isn't about bots. It's a complaint about the behavior of real American people. Where is the actual science? Why are you picking this as an example of high quality research? It's not only blatantly partisan, reading more like a Guardian op-ed than a research paper, it starts by citing paper (2), the one that wrecks the whole premise of the field! They are happy to cite it as evidence that they should look for astroturfing instead of bots, but forget to mention that it shows that even an intelligence agency was unable to have any impact on politics by running Twitter campaigns. Yet that doesn't stop them asserting that their line of research is important due to the "innovative misuse of social media towards undermining democratic processes by promotion of magical thinking".
This sort of problem is rampant in published research. I've seen it so often that a paper cites another paper which directly undermines the conclusions of the first, yet the authors don't address or even mention it. This sort of thing is just deceptive. If they want to cite paper (2) then they need to tackle its conclusion.
The rest of it is just US Democratic Russiagate talking points. Getting into the accuracy of that is a book-sized job and and not about science, so I won't do that here, there are many such debates on the internet.
So that's your three papers. One is OK but not very valuable, one ends up (unintentionally?) wrecking the premise of the other ~10,000+ papers and one isn't even scientific research. It's unclear how they were picked but if these are really the best examples of high quality research from the field then, indeed, who really cares if Musk cuts it all off.
1. Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends
A good start! It makes relatively limited claims (they aren't trying to assert whole elections are being distorted by Twitter bots) and is indeed higher quality than the ones I've been citing. It actually makes its data available, which is a step forward. But it's had limited impact (28 citations), and it's also not particularly useful. All they're doing is revealing that there is ordinary spam, hijacking and SEO on Turkish Twitter, which was never in doubt. All social media sites have these problems and the authors were tipped off by some amateur third party that highlights these campaigns. Most of what they find is plain commercial spam, there's also some politics in there related to local Turkish issues like cab drivers protesting against Uber but there's no evidence presented that this is actually having a real impact on politics.
The main question here is why are universities spending grant money on subsidizing Twitter? The only people who can do anything with this paper are Twitter's spam team, there isn't generalizable new scientific knowledge coming out of it.
2. Political Astroturfing on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation Campaign
This one starts with a big claim, so it can at least say it's doing important research. But I really wonder why you suggested it because it actually agrees with us and even destroys the underlying premise of the entire field! A pretty useful paper that might be worth citing in future articles on the topic, in fact.
Firstly, their conclusion is that "if even a powerful and well-financed organization like the South Korean secret service cannot instigate a successful disinformation campaign, then this may be more difficult than often assumed in public debates". In other words, the supposed problem motivating this entire field of >10,000 papers doesn't actually exist: even government agencies fail to have impact when they try to sway opinions with Twitter.
Secondly, they accept that our criticisms of the field are correct. "We argue that past research’s predominant focus on automated accounts, famously known as “social bots” ... misses its target since reports on recent astroturfing campaigns suggest that they are often at least partially run by actual humans" and "Because a ground truth is rarely available, systematic research into astroturfing campaigns is lacking".
They also dunk on ML models on page three, and admit that "these studies still largely focus on anecdotes and lack a theory-driven framework" i.e. are more like blog posts than scientific research. These were all points being made by Gallwitz, Kreil and myself years ago.
The paper does have issues! Still, they should get some cred for being honest about their findings, albeit on the penultimate page of a 25 page study. The first sentence of the paper is phrased in a misleading way: they assert that astroturfing on Twitter has the potential to influence politics, but their conclusion is that it actually doesn't. That's a problem that you see a lot when reading papers in some fields.
Paper 3. QAnon Propaganda on Twitter as Information Warfare.
Note that this paper also isn't about bots. It's a complaint about the behavior of real American people. Where is the actual science? Why are you picking this as an example of high quality research? It's not only blatantly partisan, reading more like a Guardian op-ed than a research paper, it starts by citing paper (2), the one that wrecks the whole premise of the field! They are happy to cite it as evidence that they should look for astroturfing instead of bots, but forget to mention that it shows that even an intelligence agency was unable to have any impact on politics by running Twitter campaigns. Yet that doesn't stop them asserting that their line of research is important due to the "innovative misuse of social media towards undermining democratic processes by promotion of magical thinking".
This sort of problem is rampant in published research. I've seen it so often that a paper cites another paper which directly undermines the conclusions of the first, yet the authors don't address or even mention it. This sort of thing is just deceptive. If they want to cite paper (2) then they need to tackle its conclusion.
The rest of it is just US Democratic Russiagate talking points. Getting into the accuracy of that is a book-sized job and and not about science, so I won't do that here, there are many such debates on the internet.
So that's your three papers. One is OK but not very valuable, one ends up (unintentionally?) wrecking the premise of the other ~10,000+ papers and one isn't even scientific research. It's unclear how they were picked but if these are really the best examples of high quality research from the field then, indeed, who really cares if Musk cuts it all off.
I'll try and find time to look at the papers you cite as high quality later today.
> you conclude from that that all academic use of the Twitter API is garbage, which is nonsensical
"All" no, a vast amount of it, yes. Is it nonsensical? Twitter themselves concluded this exact same thing even before Musk, both in public blog posts and internal emails (see the Twitter Files for examples).
But we don't really need to cite Twitter as an authority here. Just try to answer this question: what mechanisms exist that are stopping bad science outside the field of social bot research, and why have those mechanisms failed within it? It can't be peer review, university hiring committees and so on because those are all existing within social studies as well.
> Your hyperbolic language ...
What language do you think is hyperbolic, exactly, and why?
> Pointing out the scientific flaws of 'tools' like Botometer is wholly valid, but the effort to research and develop tools for bot identification are a response to the fact of systematic information pollution
This is exactly the sort of problem I'm talking about: this justification is circular. We do bad bot research because we know there are bots, we know there are bots because we do bad bot research. If there were actually big problems with social bots then it would be easy to find them and research them; we wouldn't see this situation where basically all papers are seeing patterns in noise.
Botometer is a good example of that. You admit that it's "scientifically flawed" but with respect, that language is not "hyperbolic" enough. It's not merely flawed, it's outright useless. It had an FP rate of 50% when tested against a known human dataset. Yet the Botometer paper has been cited over 900 times now (up from ~700 when I previously wrote about it). When exactly does the rest of the world get to call time on this bad behavior by the academy? These people are changing the opinions of world leaders on the back of misinformation, the exact problem they claim to be fighting.
> It is not the fault of academics if media pundits over-simplify the fruits of their research.
It wasn't media pundits that made academics cite the Botometer paper over 900 times, or write outright deceptive papers like the one I reviewed. The problem here is academia and the institutions need to start taking responsibility for it. Otherwise you're going to get situations like this one: academia will just get cut off from data. People don't have time to try and figure out which little subsections of the academy are following the rules to separate them from the rest.
> you conclude from that that all academic use of the Twitter API is garbage, which is nonsensical
"All" no, a vast amount of it, yes. Is it nonsensical? Twitter themselves concluded this exact same thing even before Musk, both in public blog posts and internal emails (see the Twitter Files for examples).
But we don't really need to cite Twitter as an authority here. Just try to answer this question: what mechanisms exist that are stopping bad science outside the field of social bot research, and why have those mechanisms failed within it? It can't be peer review, university hiring committees and so on because those are all existing within social studies as well.
> Your hyperbolic language ...
What language do you think is hyperbolic, exactly, and why?
> Pointing out the scientific flaws of 'tools' like Botometer is wholly valid, but the effort to research and develop tools for bot identification are a response to the fact of systematic information pollution
This is exactly the sort of problem I'm talking about: this justification is circular. We do bad bot research because we know there are bots, we know there are bots because we do bad bot research. If there were actually big problems with social bots then it would be easy to find them and research them; we wouldn't see this situation where basically all papers are seeing patterns in noise.
Botometer is a good example of that. You admit that it's "scientifically flawed" but with respect, that language is not "hyperbolic" enough. It's not merely flawed, it's outright useless. It had an FP rate of 50% when tested against a known human dataset. Yet the Botometer paper has been cited over 900 times now (up from ~700 when I previously wrote about it). When exactly does the rest of the world get to call time on this bad behavior by the academy? These people are changing the opinions of world leaders on the back of misinformation, the exact problem they claim to be fighting.
> It is not the fault of academics if media pundits over-simplify the fruits of their research.
It wasn't media pundits that made academics cite the Botometer paper over 900 times, or write outright deceptive papers like the one I reviewed. The problem here is academia and the institutions need to start taking responsibility for it. Otherwise you're going to get situations like this one: academia will just get cut off from data. People don't have time to try and figure out which little subsections of the academy are following the rules to separate them from the rest.
Why cant universities fund it with their billion dollar endowments?
There is literally only couple of US universities having that, for smaller universities 42k a month for a research or two doesn't make any financial sense at all. This price is just basically a huge gatekeeper to prevent most people using it.
Not many universities have billion dollar endowments.
Indiana University a Midwest US state school has a 3+ Billion Dollar endowment behind it and ranks 16th right now. University of Texas is #1 at $42B and Berkeley is 20th at $2.6B. These are just state schools. Stanford is at $38B and Yale is at $42B. There is plenty of money out there in the university endowments. They just need to spend it on things like research and professors rather than Golf Courses and sports stadiums.
There are ~6500 universities/colleges in the US. Probably around 1,000 academic schools. How many have $1B plus endowments? 150? So maybe around 15%.
https://www.univstats.com/corestats/
https://www.univstats.com/corestats/
I think Twitter will sell your attention in addition to other revenue streams, given the chance.
Exactly, your attention is always going to be sold to the highest bidder—that won't change.
Now you just get worse 3rd party apps and integrations. Interesting to see the attempt to spin this as a positive.
Now you just get worse 3rd party apps and integrations. Interesting to see the attempt to spin this as a positive.
if the integrations and overall experience is worse... won't that mean there's less attention (and possibly less quality attention) to be sold?
They’ll chase anything that makes money but if the ONLY source of money is our attention etc… that’s a worse spot right?
It is for Twitter. Our attention is a synonym for showing ads. If advertisers step away because they got nervous about the behavior of the new owner then it's better for Twitter to have other sources of income than not.
And if collect data, pay for that too.
When does Twitter start paying it's users who produce the data?
When does Twitter start paying it's users who produce the data?
> When does Twitter start paying it's users who produce the data?
Why do those users choose to produce data for Twitter/on Twitter for free?
Why do those users choose to produce data for Twitter/on Twitter for free?
Because it's free to do so.
Then you can't really complain about not getting paid for it, can you?
Nope. But if Twitter starts making a side of this situation more financial then people are going feel differently about this relationship.
The free users remain being the product though, don't we? We are the reach and the mined so the company can sell that but at least maybe there's a chance of not being interrupted.
Ideally, everyone would pay to use the service and nothing would be mined for manipulation but that world is hard to imagine in 2023.
Ideally, everyone would pay to use the service and nothing would be mined for manipulation but that world is hard to imagine in 2023.
Like it or not the service being available is the payment. People clearly already want to use it
When they have a viable alternative option that competes with twitter where they can get similar influence which his what most of them want
> When does Twitter start paying it's users who produce the data?
Never.
Having a business in the capitalist system is about maximising profits.
Musk spent ~$44bn USD or so to buy Twitter (and tried to back out of the deal too). Do you really think Twitter is gonna fairly compensate any of the users any time soon?
You’d be better off migrating to Mastodon. Maybe some instance in that ecosystem will figure out how to use crypto for good, and to compensate its content creators.
Never.
Having a business in the capitalist system is about maximising profits.
Musk spent ~$44bn USD or so to buy Twitter (and tried to back out of the deal too). Do you really think Twitter is gonna fairly compensate any of the users any time soon?
You’d be better off migrating to Mastodon. Maybe some instance in that ecosystem will figure out how to use crypto for good, and to compensate its content creators.
> Do you really think Twitter is gonna fairly compensate any of the users any time soon?
Yes, if it makes business sense to do so. Like it does for content creatos.
Yes, if it makes business sense to do so. Like it does for content creatos.
Lol what? Can you please explain your thinking on this unless you were just trying to be funny.
>I'm not the greatest Musk fan but IMHO his approach to charge those who benefits from Twitter is spot on and I'm actually rooting for him to be able to find a viable business model which does not rely on selling my attention to highest bidder.
If there is money to be made, he's not going to pass it up. Why not charge and sell your attention to the highest bidder at the same time? It's the literal cable model and it's proven to work for 50 years.
If there is money to be made, he's not going to pass it up. Why not charge and sell your attention to the highest bidder at the same time? It's the literal cable model and it's proven to work for 50 years.
> ...find a viable business model which does not rely on selling my attention to highest bidder.
They'll do both.
They'll do both.
Who makes money off twitter?
Maybe a few apps, but Twitter seems to rather they not exist.
Anyone else really make any money?
Twitter is a weird place, I’m not sure how to make money off of it, or who does that’s would care to pay enough for the service?
Maybe a few apps, but Twitter seems to rather they not exist.
Anyone else really make any money?
Twitter is a weird place, I’m not sure how to make money off of it, or who does that’s would care to pay enough for the service?
Except twitter won't pay the people who have created the data in the first place. So it's stopping short of actually paying your dues.
I dont expect to be paid for my content creation on facebook or instagram.
Yt, for sure.
I think it is fair to say this is a moving topic
Yt, for sure.
I think it is fair to say this is a moving topic
[deleted]
The difficulty is, people can still scrape the data. That data scraping is likely to cost Twitter more than the API did, as they have to serve up the full page.
Yes, you can try to block people doing that, but historically people haven't succeeded.
Yes, you can try to block people doing that, but historically people haven't succeeded.
I, for one, will scrape Twitter relentlessly.
scrapping data at scale is much harder that you are making it sounds like. Especially is the company is trying hard to prevent that. Much cheaper just to pay for the api.
LinkedIn tries hard to prevent scraping, but there are third parties doing it, and then re-selling it. Each user is presumably paying a fraction of what the scraping cost.
Fully agree, I just wish I knew who these people are, because clearly he has looked at some data that suggests they'll pay up, or his hosting costs will be significantly lowered.
I’m not convinced Elon uses a lot of data in decisions like these. This might be just an arbitrary number to start negotiations from.
If drive everyone important off for good with a ridiculous price before “the market adjusts” (Musk changes his mind) you’ve done permanent damage to your operation.
The reach and data aren't twitter the business' to exchange though, it's the Twitter community of users
It's expensive because now the real customers are now out in the open: governments. Endless coffers.
They could make even more money if they charged $84k per month! Genius business model.
That wouldn't be the weed number tho.
that depends on the demand elasticity.
you're opposed to selling your attention to the highest bidder but you think it's a good business model to sell all of "your data" to any "market rate" bidder?
you know those are just the same thing right?
you know those are just the same thing right?
This is the burning of the public space.
Alas the zombie entity will persist, people will stay here, but this is absolutely the death of this as a public social space, and the start of a dark new pay-to-play world for Twitter where only the very-few have real capabilities.
This is the death of the spirit of the project. May it hopefully wreck & burn fast.
The pretense of Twitter's usefulness will take too long to flail fade & fail, and it's not so instantly notable to consumers, but this is the most epic & rapid grade #enshittification a once valuable & once core internet service that the planet has ever witnessed. This is a complete fall from grace & capability. Nothing remains, nothing of value is left to the world.
Tim O'Reilly famously said, "create more value than you capture." Twitter is no longer a place that creates value. It is now a Scrooge McDuck potemkin village, profiteering off an image that it no longer deserves. Burn, fucker, burn, burn the fuck down, you vile traitorous, disrespectful pieces of shit that have ruined everything about the idea. Perish. New Twitter stands against humanity.
Alas the zombie entity will persist, people will stay here, but this is absolutely the death of this as a public social space, and the start of a dark new pay-to-play world for Twitter where only the very-few have real capabilities.
This is the death of the spirit of the project. May it hopefully wreck & burn fast.
The pretense of Twitter's usefulness will take too long to flail fade & fail, and it's not so instantly notable to consumers, but this is the most epic & rapid grade #enshittification a once valuable & once core internet service that the planet has ever witnessed. This is a complete fall from grace & capability. Nothing remains, nothing of value is left to the world.
Tim O'Reilly famously said, "create more value than you capture." Twitter is no longer a place that creates value. It is now a Scrooge McDuck potemkin village, profiteering off an image that it no longer deserves. Burn, fucker, burn, burn the fuck down, you vile traitorous, disrespectful pieces of shit that have ruined everything about the idea. Perish. New Twitter stands against humanity.
Anyone who wants to do research will just end up using Twitter's data from non official sources.
Last I checked web scraping and using undocumented but public APIs used in web/apps is still legal.0
Ex: Nitter operates without official APIs.
Ex: Nitter operates without official APIs.
At least 1% of tweets are archived on Internet Archive. https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/46145
Verified was also going to be $20/mo, I'm sure businesses and researchers are just going to wait it out until the price drops.
So we just need Stephen King to chime in again?
Edit for context: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
Edit for context: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
Idk. Context?
https://twitter.com/stephenking/status/1587042605627490304 and subsequently https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
There's a blue check by his name now, so...
So... nothing?
If you click on his checkmark it tells you that he's a legacy verified account and does NOT pay for Twitter Blue.
If you click on his checkmark it tells you that he's a legacy verified account and does NOT pay for Twitter Blue.
Sorry, I guess I thought Musk had already removed legacy checks. The whole thing seems a little silly. King obviously doesn't need Twitter, but I'm sure he receives more value out of Twitter than $8/mo even so (or whatever they're charging now).
Twitter sells user eyeballs to advertisers. The user’s are there to look at posts from people like King.
I’m sure pre-Musk Twitter got far more than $8/mo out of King posting on the site.
I’m sure pre-Musk Twitter got far more than $8/mo out of King posting on the site.
I'm sure Twitter gets more value out of King than $8/month.
Seems like and interesting research problem. Too bad the researchers won’t be able to afford the API access cost to research things like this ;)
I'm sure they do, but wasn't that also a part of Twitter Blue, a revenue share, or have they not followed through with that either?
But accounts like his are what _drives_ people to Twitter. I already left months ago, but I'd definitely be leaving if the company that profits off of me wants to charge me for the privilege.
[deleted]
...we don't know what that means.
Hilarious to see a half-billionaire complain about 20 bucks a month.
At the very least, they should be allowing Blue subscribers enough API access to do basic Zapier style workflows running a few times a day. There are a lot of folks out there who want to do the same simple personal uses of the Twitter API they have been doing for 10+ years.
He's probably getting some benefit out of this approach:
1. Some fun (the 420 comments) and shocking people. 2. Market research to see how people react to various prices (A/B testing while trying and backing out of bad decisions) 3. Free press - good or bad, it's in the news and he must be getting some benefit out of the attention.
Not a fan of this approach and hoping everything lands in a fair place.
1. Some fun (the 420 comments) and shocking people. 2. Market research to see how people react to various prices (A/B testing while trying and backing out of bad decisions) 3. Free press - good or bad, it's in the news and he must be getting some benefit out of the attention.
Not a fan of this approach and hoping everything lands in a fair place.
I'm surprised that nobody has noticed that the price was set at 42k because it's another one of Musk's 420 (aka weed) jokes, and not because of any specific data showing that is the optimal price point for this offering.
He will run on the vague impression people had of him being a cool guy who smokes weed for the next 2 decades. I hope he goes to Mars so we don't have to hear about him, or at least we'll have an 8 minute delay?
It's a luxury service. There is no optimal price outside of "high enough to prevent entities for whom money is an object from applying".
Do we know why Musk would be fond of 420 jokes?
Nothing new. It has been prohibitively expensive and cumbersome to get Twitter data for years, even for research as an Institution.
Any idea how much this compares to previous prices?
The last time I talked to Twitter sales (about 2 years ago) they were asking for 6k/mo.
That is false.
https://twitter.com/stokel/status/1634310536723668995?s=20
Thank you for reminding me why I dislike this place so much.
I've literally got the email right here: "As I mentioned on the phone, we structure them as a monthly subscription based on an annual agreement. Variables that affect pricing are the APIs you use to get data and the amount of data you consume each month. Our smallest packages fall between $5,000-$8,000 per month."
The price they quoted me, over the phone, was 6k. Doesn't mean we took it (we didn't) but that was what they were asking for. I know others that were paying 5k/mo.
And I know others who still had free accounts from way back in the day. Everyone is being swept up now.
I've literally got the email right here: "As I mentioned on the phone, we structure them as a monthly subscription based on an annual agreement. Variables that affect pricing are the APIs you use to get data and the amount of data you consume each month. Our smallest packages fall between $5,000-$8,000 per month."
The price they quoted me, over the phone, was 6k. Doesn't mean we took it (we didn't) but that was what they were asking for. I know others that were paying 5k/mo.
And I know others who still had free accounts from way back in the day. Everyone is being swept up now.
False. You could search thru and consume almost 5-10% of all tweets for free with the free API provided you had enough user tokens.
Of course if you paid the full firehose, it would be much more expensive
Of course if you paid the full firehose, it would be much more expensive
I don't know what you mean about it being false. If you circumvent the API license by making tons of tokens and connecting from different IPs it is possible- much in the same way that a bank has free money if you rob it.
Twitter also used to suspend API keys seemingly at random, making research data on Twitter nearly impossible.
Given that Twitter data has been becoming less valuable due to recent events, I don't think Twitter has as much leverage to raise the price, even for businesses specializing in such data.
What recent events? Why would their data be less valuable?
Maybe this > https://gizmodo.com/meta-p92-twitter-clone-decentralized-mas...
META might go on attack mode.
META might go on attack mode.
420 with just a few extra zeros added on, eh? The hilarity just never stops, does it?
In India, 420 is generally used to refer to a person who is a cheat/dishonest. Still fits guess.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_420_of_the_Indian_Pe...
I wonder what guarantee Twitter is offering that they won't just cancel or change the terms of the API program again with only a few days' notice.
"Trust us, bro"
420...00 as in weed.. Musk doesn't actually want people to have API access.
Sounds like they want to become the next Bloomberg Terminal.
so scraping then?
A disservice to researchers out there. Musk is willing to let misinformation and extremism run rampant
All this daily anti musk rhetoric veiled in pro science narratives and not one comment on every other entity milking academic budgets. There’s plenty of examples.