In recent years, social media companies shut down public access tools like Meta’s CrowdTangle and replaced them with content libraries, or, like X, paywalled their API data, forcing academics to pay “hundreds of dollars a month,” said Duncan Allen, a research officer at Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in Germany.
Access to the X streaming API (not the firehose) actually costs ~$5000/month. This makes monitoring the social dynamics around current events extremely difficult.
But I did not get this part:
Application forms differ by platform, but most require data to be stored on infrastructure that cannot be compromised—such as a machine physically disconnected from the internet—a resource most universities lack, Iamnitchi said.
What? Just get an old machine, hook up an external hard drive array, and run your analyses offline. This is bad in that You're slowing responsiveness down to 24 hours or 6 hours or however often you dump out real-time data and retrieve the analytical results, so you can't offer a real-time intelligence monitor via your university's portal.
On the other hand if you're just doing research for publication it's a very minor inconvenience. I don't understand the contention that 'universities don't have those sort of resources' and can only assume the writers omitted some significant context in pursuit of a more dramatic story.
There are few workarounds. Iamnitchi and Allen said they resort to scraping on the platforms that allow it, a time-consuming process that exports website data into spreadsheets.
What??? Wired should hire people who are at least somewhat competent on the topics they write about.
Even with sophisticated tools, scraping “is not very comprehensive,” Allen said. It cannot capture an account’s complete follower list, making coordinated disinformation networks difficult to map.
It's unclear what platform the researcher is alluding to, but ime this is absolutely possible with scraping; it just requires patience. I'm also a bit surprised that researchers are still reying so much on follower networks in 2026.
In recent years, social media companies shut down public access tools like Meta’s CrowdTangle and replaced them with content libraries, or, like X, paywalled their API data, forcing academics to pay “hundreds of dollars a month,” said Duncan Allen, a research officer at Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in Germany.
Access to the X streaming API (not the firehose) actually costs ~$5000/month. This makes monitoring the social dynamics around current events extremely difficult.
But I did not get this part:
Application forms differ by platform, but most require data to be stored on infrastructure that cannot be compromised—such as a machine physically disconnected from the internet—a resource most universities lack, Iamnitchi said.
What? Just get an old machine, hook up an external hard drive array, and run your analyses offline. This is bad in that You're slowing responsiveness down to 24 hours or 6 hours or however often you dump out real-time data and retrieve the analytical results, so you can't offer a real-time intelligence monitor via your university's portal.
On the other hand if you're just doing research for publication it's a very minor inconvenience. I don't understand the contention that 'universities don't have those sort of resources' and can only assume the writers omitted some significant context in pursuit of a more dramatic story.
There are few workarounds. Iamnitchi and Allen said they resort to scraping on the platforms that allow it, a time-consuming process that exports website data into spreadsheets.
What??? Wired should hire people who are at least somewhat competent on the topics they write about.
Even with sophisticated tools, scraping “is not very comprehensive,” Allen said. It cannot capture an account’s complete follower list, making coordinated disinformation networks difficult to map.
It's unclear what platform the researcher is alluding to, but ime this is absolutely possible with scraping; it just requires patience. I'm also a bit surprised that researchers are still reying so much on follower networks in 2026.