Twitter has introduced an update to its API platform to allow developers and researchers to study crucial public conversations around COVID-19 in real time.
The data will facilitate research on several topics related to the pandemic, including spread of the disease, reach of misinformation and crisis management within communities, among others, TechCrunch reported.
The new data may also help the developer community to build machine learning and data tools designed to aid the scientific community in answering key questions about COVID-19.
“We want developers and researchers to be able to study the conversation about COVID-19 in real-time. To do so, we’re releasing a streaming endpoint into Twitter Developer Labs to do just that,” Twitter said.
The COVID-19 streaming endpoint will return tweets based on the company’s internal COVID-19 tweet annotation and a set of defined parameters that the social media firm thinks deliver a comprehensive view of the conversation around this topic.
Compared to Twitter’s other streaming endpoints, the COVID-19 stream does not have throughput limitations — as opposed to 50 tweets per second of the filtered stream endpoint.