It seems to me that as a subject pool, Twitter is extremely bad (like other options that researchers tend pick out of frugality, like Mechanical Turk). Why use it at all?
I think the paper showing that Twitter activity slightly predicted stock movements was incredibly interesting and valuable to know. I'm sure there are plenty of other papers as well, like analyses of Arab spring?
Twitter was a big driving force in that movement. Being able to track moment by moment activity and movements and how this shaped the Arab spring is not something you could achieve with other sources.
> Twitter was a big driving force in that movement. Being able to track moment by moment activity and movements and how this shaped the Arab spring is not something you could achieve with other sources.
Would anyone have been able to do that without paying? Years ago, someone told me you could get at most 1% of the "firehose" without paying, and if you paid you could get ~10% (however the free sample wasn't a subset of the paid sample, so they still grabbed both and de-duped).
You can do a lot with the 1% sample - indeed you would probably want to filter it further, both because retrieved streams count toward your monthly tweet cap (2 million/mo on the best non-academic free tier, I think 5m or 10m month if you are a postgrad w/institutional affiliation), and because the filtering capabilities are pretty rich. An obvious use case is tracking big political or industrial influencers and estimating their reach and peer cohort by looking at different kinds of engagement they get.
