When X shut down its free Academic Research Track in 2023, the full archive and high-volume access that powered nearly two decades of published Twitter research disappeared. Sorsa API brings that access back, free or discounted for verified non-commercial researchers.
Or just write to us: contacts@sorsa.io
For seventeen years the Twitter API was the dominant data source across political science, public health, computational social science, communication studies, and linguistics — powering work on elections, misinformation, and crisis communication. The Academic Research Track gave qualified researchers full-archive search back to 2006 and roughly 10 million tweets per month. Announced in February 2023, free API access was shut off that spring, and by mid-2023 the academic endpoints were removed entirely. The replacement tiers offered little for research: a $100 basic plan with no historical access, or an enterprise contract starting near $42,000 per month. More than a hundred studies were canceled or suspended. For a deeper look at accessing old tweets, see our guide to historical Twitter data.
Shared research datasets are distributed as lists of tweet IDs to stay within X's terms. Rehydrating them used to require the official API through tools like DocNow Hydrator or twarc, both of which broke when free and academic access ended. Sorsa's bulk endpoint takes up to 100 tweet IDs per request and returns full tweet JSON with author profiles included, with no developer account and no OAuth. Every tweet also carries view_count and bookmark_count — engagement metrics the official API does not expose for third-party tweets.
Search the complete public archive using Twitter Advanced Search syntax: from: and to: for account-level collection, since: and until: for date windows, lang: for language filtering, plus exact phrases and hashtags. Build longitudinal datasets, event windows, and keyword corpora the way the Academic Track allowed. See our developer guide to searching tweets via API, or how to download every tweet from an account.
Every response includes stable tweet IDs and user IDs, so you can publish a terms-compliant ID list alongside your paper and let others reproduce your collection. Output is clean JSON that drops straight into R, pandas, or your notebook — ready for sentiment analysis and other downstream pipelines.
One API key in a request header, read-only, public data only. There is nothing to post and no account to act on behalf of, which keeps data collection straightforward to describe for IRB and ethics review. No application queue, no approval wait.
| Academic Research Trackpre-2023 | Official X API2026, pay-per-use | Sorsaflat per-request | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-archive search | Yes, back to 2006 | Enterprise tier only | Yes, back to 2006 |
| Monthly volume | ~10M tweets | Metered per post read | Flat plans, any volume |
| Approval process | Application + review, weeks | Developer-account approval | None, instant API key |
| Auth method | OAuth + bearer token | OAuth 2.0 | Single API key header |
| Cost for 1M tweets | Free, if approved | ~$5,000 | $49 Starter quota |
| Engagement metrics | Likes, retweets, replies | Limited for third-party tweets | Likes, retweets, replies + view_count & bookmark_count |
Send up to 100 tweet IDs per call, loop your dataset in batches of 100, and write the results to .ndjson for analysis. Full setup is in the historical-data docs.
import requests ids = ["1266876474440761346", "1266868259925737474"] # up to 100 per request res = requests.post( "https://api.sorsa.io/v3/tweet-info-bulk", headers={"ApiKey": "YOUR_API_KEY"}, json={"tweet_links": ids}, ) for tweet in res.json()["tweets"]: print(tweet["full_text"], tweet["user"]["username"])
Who qualifies: faculty, postdocs, PhD and master's students, and civil-society researchers on non-commercial projects — master's theses, PhD dissertations, and funded faculty studies all count. What you get: a free request allowance for pilot studies, or a standing discount on paid plans for larger collections. We reply within two business days.
To apply, email contacts@sorsa.io from your institutional address (.edu or your university domain), or use the form below — describe your research question and how you will use the data, and confirm the work is non-commercial. We provide a data-use and compliance letter for IRB and ethics submissions on request. Flat per-request plans also bill as a fixed, predictable line item for grant proposals, unlike the pay-per-use metering of the official API.
Or just write to us: contacts@sorsa.io
If your work is commercial, or you just want standard API access without applying, we have flat per-request plans for any volume. The full breakdown lives on the pricing page.
Picture a communications group studying election discourse, holding a 3.2-million-tweet ID dataset shared by a partner lab. After the Academic Track closed, a twarc pipeline like theirs would return only authentication errors. On Sorsa's bulk endpoint, those 3.2M IDs are 32,000 batch requests of 100 — about a third of a single Pro month, and roughly 30 minutes of wall-clock time at 20 requests per second. Rehydration resumes with no enterprise contract and no change to the collection methodology.
Yes. The bulk endpoint accepts up to 100 tweet IDs per request and returns full tweet content with author profiles. It works as a drop-in replacement for older hydration tools that depended on the official API, and it needs only an API key, with no developer account and no OAuth.
Yes. Full-archive search reaches public tweets back to March 2006, with the standard advanced operators for accounts, date ranges, languages, phrases, and hashtags.
No. Access is a single API key passed in a request header. There is no application queue, no approval wait, and no OAuth flow.
Sorsa is read-only and returns only public data. There are no write actions and no acting on behalf of an account, which keeps collection straightforward to describe. We provide a data-use and compliance letter for IRB and ethics submissions on request.
Yes. We provide free or discounted access for verified non-commercial academic research. Email contacts@sorsa.io from your institutional address with a short description of your project and intended data use, and we will review it.
No. Like any rehydration, only tweets that are still public are returned. Tweets deleted or made private after the original collection cannot be recovered, which is expected and consistent across every method.
No. Sorsa is strictly read-only and covers Twitter/X only. It does not post, reply, follow, or perform any write action.
Full-archive Twitter/X search and tweet-ID rehydration on a flat, grant-friendly budget. Read-only, public data, one API key.