Scientists advocate open access to X’s data for academic research
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New Delhi: Researchers are urging for unrestricted access to social media platform X’s data for academic studies, emphasizing its critical role in analyzing political engagement trends. Their demand follows the abrupt halt of a research initiative from Saarland University, Germany, after X’s owner, Elon Musk, blocked free access to the platform’s data for academic purposes in June 2023. Musk, the US-based entrepreneur, had acquired the platform, formerly known as Twitter, in October 2022.
The research team aimed to determine whether Twitter prioritized tweets from right-leaning politicians between 2021 and 2023. “It is simply not acceptable that access to these vast amounts of data is either unaffordable or provided so selectively that no meaningful analyses can be conducted,” said Ingmar Weber, lead researcher, professor of artificial intelligence (AI), and chair for societal computing at Saarland University.
The researchers are advocating for legislative measures to restore academic access to social network data. Over a two-year period before the restrictions took effect, they analyzed tweets from 6,550 Twitter accounts linked to approximately 8,600 politicians from twelve countries with the highest user activity on X, including India, Argentina, Germany, and the US.
Their findings, published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, revealed no significant bias in the dissemination of content from left-leaning or right-leaning politicians across the studied nations. However, the team observed notable shifts in engagement patterns following Musk’s takeover, including a considerable rise in the number of likes, a slight increase in the likes-per-retweet ratio, and a substantial decline in retweets.
“We believe that this is because early followers of a Twitter account are more politically engaged and tend to support content more actively. But as the political message spreads to a broader audience, it becomes more likely that the number of likes will go up, while the retweet rate declines,” explained study author and computer scientist Brahmani Nutakki, a PhD scholar at Saarland University.
The research team encountered challenges in analyzing data due to platform changes introduced between November 2022 and June 2023. One major hurdle was the removal of rules prohibiting hateful conduct, which had previously aimed to prevent attacks on individuals.
"Changes to Twitter's functionality also resulted in shifts in the user population, making it difficult for us to attribute the observed trends to a single specific cause," Nutakki noted. The study further found that political content reached a wider audience following these modifications.
“In the period before June 2023, we found no evidence of a significant difference in engagement patterns between users on the left and those on the right of the political spectrum,” Weber stated.
While media reports have highlighted instances where posts from Republican politicians received greater engagement than those from Democrats or cited an increase in hate content, the researchers stress the necessity of continuous academic scrutiny of X’s data.
“These worrying changes to social media platforms such as Twitter/X are jeopardizing democratic structures in many countries and require continuous scrutiny by academic researchers,” Weber emphasized. “We are calling for the implementation of legislation such as Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (in the European Union) so that academic researchers can regain access to social network data.”
The study's authors assert that their findings contribute to the broader discourse on social media’s role in political dialogue, underscoring the need for ongoing monitoring of policy shifts and trends in the digital media landscape.
With PTI inputs