There is an important account of the impact of the loss of access to the Twitter API in the paper today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/20/twitter-policy-elon-mus... The restrictions on the free API are a problem, though the idea of free in this context is misleading. It was never free. Shareholders, lenders, and advertisers paid to make it possible to expose the data via APIs in ways that diverted attention from the real cost of engineers, buildings, electricity, bandwidth, lawyers, HR, sales people, and many other expenses that pay for large scale platform operations. Somebody always paid for all of that or else it went into the Twitter debt pile, which was large and growing at the time of the acquisition. The current owner has laid bare the finances of Twitter in stark and bizarre ways while undermining advertising. I have spent the last few months talking to a wide variety of stakeholders about what is possible now. There are third party data vendors that have deals with Twitter that predate and supersede the $42K/month options widely reported in the press. We are closer to launching a new multi-university consortium to ensure that at least some Twitter data remains accessible going into the fall 2023 semester and 2024. It will not be free or fully unlimited. It will not be "big data" on the scale of 10s or 100s of millions of Tweets. Nor will it arrive via the API, at least not at first. However, it will be well curated and stored in a manner where teaching and collaborative multi-institution research will take place with fresh data samples pulled weekly from the full Twitter firehose going back up to 15 months. Once the cornerstones of the data access consortium are established, new short-term and one-time options will come into play for students and other researchers that are not a part of the founding group of universities. Barring a mercurial violation of existing contracts, Twitter data will be accessible along with blogs, YouTube, and some other media sources as well. I have heard a number of compelling reasons to move on from Twitter while doing this consortium-building work. My concern is the loss of transparency at a critical juncture in history. There is a surging flow of openly problematic hate speech. Networks dedicated to election and COVID denialism are publishing massive amounts of content. A full-time post-J6 insurrection industry is ramping up powered by trolls and bots. The QAnons and anti-vaxxers are in the open telling preposterous stories and demanding violent revenge. If we move on from studying Twitter, or let one person determine the framework of possibility for thousands of academics, we may look back in the near future with some regret and wonder whether anything could have been done. History is path dependent. This is a proposed alternate path where we keep academic eyes focused on Twitter. The new owner may prefer to have academics give up, protest via workshops and special issues, and then move on. I am loath to comply with that planned diversion of attention. It is not safe for teetering democracies. My undergraduate professor of American political history, Howard Zinn, would likely urge us all to stay vigilant via collective action if he were here today. This is a moment where research, scholarship, and activism necessarily collide. You cannot stand still on a moving train. Anyone watching the RFK Jr Express leave the station, backed and boosted by the Twitter platform, knows the US election in 2024 is going to be an epic information war. Please contact me for a data demo or more information about having your institution join the consortium: https://calendly.com/discovertext -- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Founder and CEO, Texifter Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*