In an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and help people and organizations trying to better understand the current crisis, Twitter Inc. announced today that it’s opening up the platform to approved developers and researchers.

“To further support Twitter’s ongoing efforts to protect the public conversation, and help people find authoritative health information around COVID-19, we’re releasing a new endpoint into Twitter Developer Labs to enable approved developers and researchers to study the public conversation about COVID-19 in real time,” the company wrote in a blog post.

To date, Twitter has offered free public access through an application programming interface, although that allows developers to see only a snapshot of tweets. Twitter also gives paying clients more access to data, but the company has never opened up the amount of data that it’s now planning to do.

Now approved experts or organizations will have access to tens of millions of COVID-19-related daily tweets in many languages, said the company, saying it’s an unprecedented move for an unprecedented crisis.

Researchers will be able not only to look at how misinformation related to the spreads and how people react to that information, but they can also see more clearly where the disease is spreading.

Twitter said this opportunity might also help people working in crisis management and emergency response, while giving the scientific community more tools to work with. Access to the dataset will require that people have some experience working with Twitter data and also have the infrastructure to store and process the data.

“Given the expertise and computational resources necessary to handle this data, and recognizing the sensitivity of it, we’ve created a dedicated application to access this endpoint and plan to carefully review access requests to ensure they support the public good,” Twitter said, adding that anyone who is granted access will have to be screened and prove they can protect public safety and privacy.

Twitter will choose what tweets are included in the dataset. Tweets that include the words “coronavirus” or “COVID-19” are obvious targets, but the company will pull out hashtags related to the virus that don’t specifically mention it, and also keywords regularly used when talking about the disease.

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