Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, speaks during the POSSIBLE conference, in Miami Beach, Florida, U.S. April 18, 2023. REUTERS / Marco Bello As Twitter limits access to a tool to analyse conversations on the platform, researchers will be deprived of information that sheds light on political hate speech and incitement to violence. That will have real-world implications for tracking election meddling, disinformation campaigns and human rights abuses. The fight to counter disinformation just got tougher. In April, Twitter limited access to its “application programming interface” or API, a computer protocol that enables application software to communicate efficiently and accurately. Since Twitter was founded in 2006, its free API policy has allowed millions of users to extract data from the platform. Access to its massive public data sets allowed open-source intelligence researchers to share the information and analyse the influence of social media on politics, including its role in election meddling; harassment campaigns against opposition figures and civil society activists; and the incitement to violence and stoking conflict. The new access restrictions, if they stand, could obscure these critical insights into social media’s influence. After seventeen years of free access to millions of tweets per
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Why a Small Change at Twitter Could Have Big Consequences for Deadly Conflict
