3 ms·

Last I heard, there were less than 10 companies with access to the full firehouse (which has every tweet). Most only get a partial feed, if that. Disclaimer: U

• throwawizzle 6y ago
  There is partial firehose access, that's true. That's probably much more common than full access. I bet you could get some surveillance done with only partial access, though. And there is also such a thing as imports, which I think lets you pull historical data based on terms you want to find. I don't know if that gets a sample, or everything that matches.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  That’s true, but doesn’t mean quite what you’re implying. The full firehose was originally given to a small number of companies, including Gnip (eventually purchased by Twitter). What Gnip did was provide filtering for the firehose as well as some historical searches; this in theory would allow companies to receive in soft real time every tweet that was relevant to their search query. The result is that there are tons of people who don’t have access to the full firehose, but effectively have the ability to receive every single tweet that’s relevant to their search query. It wouldn’t be very hard to find every tweet relevant to a protest, as this is superficially quite similar to finding tweets relevant to a brand or marketed event. That being said, this isn’t a product that you can just sign up for and use. You had (my contacts no longer work at twitter) to negotiate a contract with Twitter directly to get access to this, pay large sums of money, and go through a fairly high touch sales and support process.