Is anyone on the list currently using the $5,000/month option to access Twitter data via the API for research? https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-started/about-twit... If so, please contact me about the functionality. I was wondering if there might be interest in forming a special interest research group for the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle (SIRG 2024). If a number of universities contributed a subscription fee, agreed upon a steering committee to generate key queries to create a SIRG 2024 corpus, and the data was collected via an API and then posted in free, collaborative, web-accessible platforms for research and teaching, it would be a stop gap measure to restore some academic transparency in a key social media platform implicated in 2016 and 2020 election shenanigans. If we get it up and running in the next 30 days, there will be more than 12 million curated and accessible election Tweets before the voting begins. While it's not what big data folks crave, it is enough to shine a spotlight on Twitter mechanics in the election and build new teaching and research opportunities around the data across a consortium of institutions. I know there is a ruckus about how all Twitter data should be free, and a meeting where we need not present proposed solutions involving paying for data. That is a bit insular and slightly annoying but also wearily familiar. More importantly, that is not how science works. For example: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-much-did-your-university-pay-you... Universities spend money on gathering and disseminating research and teaching data. It is a core university function. Anyone who has ever run or worked in an academic research lab or received a grant knows all about costs, direct and indirect. Please contact me if you want to be a part of SIRG 2024 focusing on the US presidential election. There are data budgets on your campus. Talk to the top librarians, your Dean, successful grant writers, as well as the VP for Research, then let's collaborate to solve this problem. There could be SIRGs for a variety of important topics. It is a collective action problem. Either we act or free ride. Stu -- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Founder and CEO, Texifter Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*