Social media is a rich source of data that researchers from many disciplines increasingly incorporate into their research. For a number of years, many groups across Australia have independently collected significant social media holdings to serve their local research community. The Australian Internert Observatory project seeks to sustainably align and connect selected established platforms into a national infrastructure that supports an extended and diverse array of research communities.

Due to the cancellation by Twitter of the API for Academic Research, our harvesting of tweets stopped on the 21st of April 2023. All other harvesting operations (Mastodon, Reddit, BlueSky, YouTube, Flickr) continue.

The Australian Internet Observatory project establishes a national infrastructure for accessing and analysing dynamic digital data, including existing collections of national interest across Twitter, BlueSkay, Mastodon, FlickR, YouTube, Reddit, and other platforms, please visit the data and methods page for more information on the collected data and citation details.

The Melbourne eResearch Group at the University of Melbourne has set up an API and a Dashboard that allow users to perform some analysis on social media posts, such as word similarity, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and tweet counts.

There are two ways to access the AIReD data collections:

• The Dashboard: use an AAF-affiliated account (the account you use in your research institution) to login from your web browser. NOTE: Social logins such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or ORCID would not work. Use the login of your research institution instead (you will be redirected to the SSO secure login page of your university or research institute)
• The API: request an API key with the API request form and access the data programmatically

If you encounter issues or have suggestions for improvements, please use the contact us form to get in touch.

The API key identifies you as an AIReD user –do not share it with anyone. With it, you can write a program to query AIReD databases. To get the most out of the API refer to its documentation .

The use of AIReD data is conditional on non-commercial use and other limitations (see Terms and Conditions ).

With either the Dashboard or the API you can download the IDs of social media posts, which can be used to get the actual tweet data via the respective APIs for later analysis. Due to privacy reasons, AIReD cannot disclose actual tweet data unless in aggregate; however, the tweet IDs can be used to download the data of interest and analyze them in ways not covered by the AOD Dashboard and API (see the tutorials).

All images generated with the help of AI.

Please read our privacy policy on the collection of personal data.