"Worst-case scenario": Twitter's API changes threaten research tools

Some OSINT tools used to analyze Twitter accounts and conversations will die. It's a reminder that mindset is more important than tools

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

It appears Twitter’s roughly decade-long position as the most open and research-friendly social platform is coming to an end.

Last Wednesday, the company announced its new free and paid API tiers. The bottom line is Twitter is killing off the free API that offered the ability to pull a significant amount of tweets and related data. The old free API was used by researchers and developers to build useful tools to investigate accounts and conversations on the platform. I’m talking about tools like Twinfoleak, TweetBeaver, Foller.me, etc.

Hi! Digital Investigations has become Indicator and all of my content has moved to Indicator.media. Please go there to read and subscribe.

Indicator publishes multiple times a week. It offers original reporting, in-depth investigations, and practical tutorials on open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools and techniques.

I hope you’ll join me there!