It was fun while it lasted, but our Florida Legislature Tweet Tracker is coming to an end.
With one week left in the regular session of Florida’s legislature, Ozean was notified that Twitter has made changes to its API that have drastically restricted third-party applications’ access to tweets and other data on the platform. In response, we are no longer able to collect the data needed for the ranking algorithm.
As of this morning, we are unable to continue to collect data from Twitter. As a result, we are finalizing the @Award today and will no longer be able to track tweets from Florida legislators.
We knew that entering this project, we risked being at the whims of Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in October 2022. We are sadden to see our fears realized.
While we are disappointed that we can no longer track tweets from Florida legislators, we are grateful for the opportunity to have done so for the 2023 regular session.
We hope that Twitter will reconsider its decision to restrict third-party access to its data.
In the meantime, we will finalize and issue a final report in the coming weeks.
