In a recent commentary published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, UB geographic information science expert Yingjie Hu and colleague Ruo-Qian Wang wrote about how Twitter’s decision to remove users’ ability to tag the precise locations of Tweets might affect research in disaster response, public health and other areas.

The authors concluded that the change may not have a pivotal impact on studies that rely on this kind of content, as a large proportion of precisely geotagged posts in three Twitter datasets they examined originated from third-party apps like Instagram (the datasets were originally collected for other studies examining people’s reaction to extreme weather events). The researchers also noted that Twitter still allows for less precise geotagging, enabling users to tag places such as a restaurant, a park, a city or a country, as opposed to a precise latitude and longitude.

Nevertheless, the recent change raises a number of issues