Twitter opens archives to Dutch university

The University of Twente is granted full access to the archives of Twitter. Along with five other universities they can use all tweets ever sent for research.

Twitter asked scientific institutions for a research proposal back in February. 1300 scientists answered to this within six weeks. Six proposals were selected, others came from Harvard Medical School and University of East London.

Djoerd Hiemstra,  assistant professor databases at the University of Twente, is going to do research on the effects of campaigns about cancer. “We want to see how those campaigns, like Movember, work on social networks and what the effects are. Maybe, after those campaigns, the tone of the conversation on social media is different”, says Hiemstra to NOS.

People worldwide send 500 million tweets a day. Twitter has information far faster than other social media or institutes. This makes it interesting for this kind of research.